Query Performance Optimization in XML Data Warehouses

XML data warehouses form an interesting basis for decision-support applications that exploit complex data. However, native-XML database management systems (DBMSs) currently bear limited performances and it is necessary to research for ways to optimize them. In this chapter, we present two such techniques. First, we propose a join index that is specifically adapted to the multidimensional architecture of XML warehouses. It eliminates join operations while preserving the information contained in the original warehouse. Second, we present a strategy for selecting XML materialized views by clustering the query workload. To validate these proposals, we measure the response time of a set of decision-support XQueries over an XML data warehouse, with and without using our optimization techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate their efficiency, even when queries are complex and data are voluminous.