Recommending XML physical designs for XML databases

Database systems employ physical structures such as indexes and materialized views to improve query performance, potentially by orders of magnitude. It is therefore important for a database administrator to choose the appropriate configuration of these physical structures for a given database. XML database systems are increasingly being used to manage semi-structured data, and XML support has been added to commercial database systems. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic physical design for XML databases, which is the process of automatically selecting the best set of physical structures for a database and a query workload. We focus on recommending two types of physical structures: XML indexes and relational materialized views of XML data. We present a design advisor for recommending XML indexes, one for recommending materialized views, and an integrated design advisor that recommends both indexes and materialized views. A key characteristic of our advisors is that they are tightly coupled with the query optimizer of the database system, and they rely on the optimizer for enumerating and evaluating physical designs. We have implemented our advisors in a prototype version of IBM DB2 V9, and we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of their recommendations using this implementation.