Storage Schemes for XML Query Cache

XML query caching for XML database-backed Web applications began to be investigated recently. Despite its practical significance, efficiency of the storage schemes for cached query results has not been addressed. In this paper, we deal with the storage schemes for XML query cache. A fundamental problem that needs to be considered in designing an efficient storage structure for XML query cache is that there exist performance tradeoffs between the two major types of operations on a cached query result. The two are (1) retrieving the whole of it to return the query result and (2) updating just a small portion of it for its incremental refresh against the updates done to its source. We propose eight different storage schemes for XML query cache, which are categorized into three groups: (1) the schemes based on the plain text file, (2) the schemes based on the persistent DOM (PDOM) file, and (3) a scheme employing an RDBMS. We implemented all of them, and compared their performance with each other. We also compared our proposal with a storage scheme based on a current state-of-the-art XML storage scheme, showing that ours is more efficient.