A large fraction of an XML document typically consists of text data. The XPath query language allows text search via the equal, contains, and starts-with predicates. Such predicates can efficiently be implemented using a compressed self-index of the document's text nodes. Most queries, however, contain some parts of querying the text of the document, plus some parts of querying the tree structure. It is therefore a challenge to choose an appropriate evaluation order for a given query, which optimally leverages the execution speeds of the text and tree indexes. Here the SXSI system is introduced; it stores the tree structure of an XML document using a bit array of opening and closing brackets, and stores the text nodes of the document using a global compressed self-index. On top of these indexes sits an XPath query engine that is based on tree automata. The engine uses fast counting queries of the text index in order to dynamically determine whether to evaluate top-down or bottom-up with respect to the tree structure. The resulting system has several advantages over existing systems: (1) on pure tree queries (without text search) such as the XPathMark queries, the SXSI system performs on par or better than the fastest known systems MonetDB and Qizx, (2) on queries that use text search, SXSI outperforms the existing systems by 1--3 orders of magnitude (depending on the size of the result set), and (3) with respect to memory consumption, SXSI outperforms all other systems for counting-only queries.
XML document markup is highly repetitive and therefore well compressible using grammar-based compression. Downward, navigational XPath can be executed over grammar-compressed trees in PTIME: the query is translated into an automaton which is executed in one pass over the grammar. This result is well-known and has been mentioned before. Here we present precise bounds on the time complexity of this problem, in terms of big-O notation. For a given grammar and XPath query, we consider three different tasks: (1) to count the number of nodes selected by the query, (2) to materialize the pre-order nu…
Previous work reports about SXSI, a fast XPath engine which executes tree automata over compressed XML indexes. Here, reasons are investigated why SXSI is so fast. It is shown that tree automata can be used as a general framework for fine grained XML query optimization. We define the "relevant nodes" of a query as those nodes that a minimal automaton must touch in order to answer the query. This notion allows to skip many subtrees during execution, and, with the help of particular tree indexes, even allows to skip internal nodes of the tree. We efficiently approximate runs over relevant nodes …
XML document markup is highly repetitive and therefore well compressible using dictionary-based methods such as DAGs or grammars. In the context of selectivity estimation, grammar-compressed trees were used before as synopsis for structural XPath queries. Here a fully-fledged index over such grammars is presented. The index allows to execute arbitrary tree algorithms with a slow-down that is comparable to the space improvement. More interestingly, certain algorithms execute much faster over the index (because no decompression occurs). E.g., for structural XPath count queries, evaluating over t…
The sheer increase in volume of RDF data demands efficient solutions for the triple indexing problem, that is devising a compressed data structure to compactly represent RDF triples by guaranteeing, at the same time, fast pattern matching operations. This problem lies at the heart of delivering good practical performance for the resolution of complex SPARQL queries on large RDF datasets. In this work, we propose a trie-based index layout to solve the problem and introduce two novel techniques to reduce its space of representation for improved effectiveness. The extensive experimental analysis …
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML. Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. XPath language is the result of an effort to provide address parts of an XML document. In support of this primary purpose, it becomes in a query language against an XML document. In this paper we present a proposal for the implementation of the XPath language in logic programming. With this aim we will descr…
Compressed bitmap indexes are used to speed up simple aggregate queries in databases. Indeed, set operations like intersections, unions and complements can be represented as logical operations (AND,OR,NOT) that are ideally suited for bitmaps. However, it is less obvious how to apply bitmaps to more advanced queries. For example, we might seek products in a store that meet some, but maybe not all, criteria. Such threshold queries generalize intersections and unions; they are often used in information-retrieval and data-mining applications. We introduce new algorithms that are sometimes three or…
Current "data deluge" has flooded the Web of Data with very large RDF datasets. They are hosted and queried through SPARQL endpoints which act as nodes of a semantic net built on the principles of the Linked Data project. Although this is a realistic philosophy for global data publishing, its query performance is diminished when the RDF engines (behind the endpoints) manage these huge datasets. Their indexes cannot be fully loaded in main memory, hence these systems need to perform slow disk accesses to solve SPARQL queries. This paper addresses this problem by a compact indexed RDF structure …
Ranked document retrieval is a fundamental task in search engines. Such queries are solved with inverted indexes that require additional 45%-80% of the compressed text space, and take tens to hundreds of microseconds per query. In this paper we show how ranked document retrieval queries can be solved within tens of milliseconds using essentially no extra space over an in-memory compressed representation of the document collection. More precisely, we enhance wavelet trees on bytecodes (WTBCs), a data structure that rearranges the bytes of the compressed collection, so that they support ranked c…
Bitmap indexes are commonly used in databases and search engines. By exploiting bit-level parallelism, they can significantly accelerate queries. However, they can use much memory, and thus we might prefer compressed bitmap indexes. Following Oracle's lead, bitmaps are often compressed using run-length encoding (RLE). Building on prior work, we introduce the Roaring compressed bitmap format: it uses packed arrays for compression instead of RLE. We compare it to two high-performance RLE-based bitmap encoding techniques: WAH (Word Aligned Hybrid compression scheme) and Concise (Compressed `n' Co…
Bitmap indexes must be compressed to reduce input/output costs and minimize CPU usage. To accelerate logical operations (AND, OR, XOR) over bitmaps, we use techniques based on run-length encoding (RLE), such as Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) compression. These techniques are sensitive to the order of the rows: a simple lexicographical sort can divide the index size by 9 and make indexes several times faster. We investigate reordering heuristics based on computed attribute-value histograms. Simply permuting the columns of the table based on these histograms can increase the sorting efficiency by 40%…
In this paper we propose an index key compression scheme based on the notion of distinction bits by proving that the distinction bits of index keys are sufficient information to determine the sorted order of the index keys correctly. While the actual compression ratio may vary depending on the characteristics of datasets (an average of 2.76 to one compression ratio was observed in our experiments), the index key compression scheme leads to significant performance improvements during the reconstruction of large-scale indexes. Our index key compression can be effectively used in database replica…
Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms and, more generally, high-throughput technologies are giving rise to an exponential growth in the size of nucleotide sequence databases. Moreover, many emerging applications of nucleotide datasets -- as those related to personalized medicine -- require the compliance with regulations about the storage and processing of sensitive data. We have designed and carefully engineered E2FM-index, a new full-text index in minute space which was optimized for compressing and encrypting nucleotide sequence collections in FASTA format and for performing fast patte…
The recent introduction of learned indexes has shaken the foundations of the decades-old field of indexing data structures. Combining, or even replacing, classic design elements such as B-tree nodes with machine learning models has proven to give outstanding improvements in the space footprint and time efficiency of data systems. However, these novel approaches are based on heuristics, thus they lack any guarantees both in their time and space requirements. We propose the Piecewise Geometric Model index (shortly, PGM-index), which achieves guaranteed I/O-optimality in query operations, learns …
The Web of Data has been gaining momentum and this leads to increasingly publish more semi-structured datasets following the RDF model, based on atomic triple units of subject, predicate, and object. Although it is a simple model, compression methods become necessary because datasets are increasingly larger and various scalability issues arise around their organization and storage. This requirement is more restrictive in RDF stores because efficient SPARQL resolution on the compressed RDF datasets is also required. This article introduces a novel RDF indexing technique (called k2-triples) supp…
Bitmap indexes are routinely used to speed up simple aggregate queries in databases. Set operations such as intersections, unions and complements can be represented as logical operations (AND, OR, NOT). However, less is known about the application of bitmap indexes to more advanced queries. We want to extend the applicability of bitmap indexes. As a starting point, we consider symmetric Boolean queries (e.g., threshold functions). For example, we might consider stores as sets of products, and ask for products that are on sale in 2 to 10 stores. Such symmetric Boolean queries generalize interse…
Bitmap indexes are frequently used to index multidimensional data. They rely mostly on sequential input/output. Bitmaps can be compressed to reduce input/output costs and minimize CPU usage. The most efficient compression techniques are based on run-length encoding (RLE), such as Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) compression. This type of compression accelerates logical operations (AND, OR) over the bitmaps. However, run-length encoding is sensitive to the order of the facts. Thus, we propose to sort the fact tables. We review lexicographic, Gray-code, and block-wise sorting. We found that a lexicogra…
In a dynamic retrieval system, documents must be ingested as they arrive, and be immediately findable by queries. Our purpose in this paper is to describe an index structure and processing regime that accommodates that requirement for immediate access, seeking to make the ingestion process as streamlined as possible, while at the same time seeking to make the growing index as small as possible, and seeking to make term-based querying via the index as efficient as possible. We describe a new compression operation and a novel approach to extensible lists which together facilitate that triple goa…
SPARQL basic graph pattern (BGP) (a.k.a. SQL inner-join) query optimization is a well researched area. However, optimization of OPTIONAL pattern queries (a.k.a. SQL left-outer-joins) poses additional challenges, due to the restrictions on the \textit{reordering} of left-outer-joins. The occurrence of such queries tends to be as high as 50% of the total queries (e.g., DBPedia query logs). In this paper, we present \textit{Left Bit Right} (LBR), a technique for \textit{well-designed} nested BGP and OPTIONAL pattern queries. Through LBR, we propose a novel method to represent such queries using a…
