Pathfinder: XQuery Off the Relational Shelf

Torsten Grust • Jens Teubner • Jan Rittinger

Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering. Special Issue on XQuery Processing: Practice and Experience. Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2008.

The Pathfinder project makes inventive use of relational database technology—originally developed to process data of strictly tabular shape to construct efficient database-supported XML and XQuery processors. Pathfinder targets database engines that implement a set-oriented mode of query execution: many off-the-shelf traditional database systems make for suitable XQuery runtime environments, but a number of off-beat storage back-ends fit that bill as well. While Pathfinder has been developed with a close eye on the XQuery semantics, some of the techniques that we will review here will be generally useful to evaluate XQuery-style iterative languages on database back-ends.