Incremental XPath Evaluation

Abstract

We study the problem of incrementally maintaining an XPath query on an XML database under updates. The updates we consider are node insertion, node deletion, and node relabeling. Our main results are that downward XPath queries can be incrementally maintained in time O(depth(D) · poly(Q)) and conjunctive forward XPath queries in time O(depth(D)· log(width(D))·poly(Q)), where D is the size of the database, Q the size of the query, and depth(D) and width(D) are the nesting depth and maximum number of siblings in the database, respectively. The auxiliary data structures for maintenance are linear in D and polynomial in Q in all these cases.