Saarland University Database Group
Lehrstuhl für Informationssysteme

Prof. Christoph Koch

Universität des Saarlandes
Fachrichtung 6.2 - Informatik
D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany
Building 36.1, 2nd floor



Talk Announcement

Composition-free XQuery

Speaker: Christoph Koch

Abstract: Nonrecursive XQuery is known to be hard for nondeterministic exponential time. Thus it is commonly believed that any algorithm for evaluating queries of that language has to require exponential amounts of working memory and doubly exponential time in the worst case. In this paper we present a property -- the lack of a certain form of composition -- that virtually all real-world XQueries have and that allows for query evaluation in singly exponential time and polynomial space. Still, we are able to show for an important special case -- our nonrecursive XQuery fragment using only atomic value equality -- that the composition-free language is just as expressive as the language with composition. Thus, under the usual complexity-theoretic assumptions, the composition-free language is an exponentially less succinct version of the language with composition.


Time and location: At the seminar "Querying and Storing XML", Saarland University.
April 26th, 4.15 p.m. (punctual/s.t.) in seminar room 14 (building 45).


For questions, contact scherzinger@cs.uni-sb.de.