BOXes: efficient maintenance of order-based labeling for dynamic XML data

Abstract

Order-based element labeling for tree-structured XML data is an important technique in XML processing. It lies at the core of many fundamental XML operations such as containment join and twig matching. While labeling for static XML documents is well understood, less is known about how to maintain accurate labeling for dynamic XML documents, when elements and subtrees are inserted and deleted. Most existing approaches do not work well for arbitrary update patterns; they either produce unacceptably long labels or incur enormous relabeling costs. We present two novel I/O-efficient data structures, W-BOX and B-BOX that efficiently maintain labeling for large, dynamic XML documents. We show analytically and experimentally that both, despite consuming minimal amounts of storage, gracefully handle arbitrary update patterns without sacrificing lookup efficiency. The two structures together provide a nice tradeoff between update and lookup costs: W-BOX has logarithmic amortized update cost and constant worst-case lookup cost, while B-BOX has constant amortized update cost and logarithmic worst-case lookup cost. We further propose techniques to eliminate the lookup cost for read-heavy workloads.