Indexing of extensible markup language data using a two dimensional bitmap

Abstract

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard for representing and exchanging information on the Internet. Storing and querying of XML data has created new challenges for conventional relational database management system. This is because XML has no fixed schema, rapidly evolving, self-describing and their types are different. For these reasons, conventional indexing methods such as sparse and dense indexing, hashing and B+ trees are not satisfactory for XML data. Bitmap indcxing is suitable for XML data. But the existing three-dimensional bitmap indexing method for which the space requirement is high and time. consuming for searching the database. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a Two Dimensional Bitmap Indexing scheme for XML data that improves the storage performance of XML data, reduce the search time to query any XML data from XML document, and improve the query perfonnance. Our system stores XML data in a compressed form and query can be performed in this compressed representation. Storage improvement is on the average of a factor of 400: I compared to the similar three dimensional approach. We have significant performance improvement in query processing as well.