PAXQuery: Parallel Analytical XML Processing

TL;DR: PAXQuery is a novel system that parallelizes the execution of XQuery queries over large collections of XML documents, and is capable of querying massive amounts of XML data very efficiently, as proved by the experimental results.

Abstract: XQuery is a general-purpose programming language for processing semi-structured data, and as such, it is very expressive. As a consequence, optimizing and parallelizing complex analytics XQuery queries is still an open, challenging problem. We demonstrate PAXQuery, a novel system that parallelizes the execution of XQuery queries over large collections of XML documents. PAXQuery compiles a rich subset of XQuery into plans expressed in the PArallelization ConTracts (PACT) programming model. Thanks to this translation, the resulting plans are optimized and executed in a massively parallel fashion by the Apache Flink system. The result is a scalable system capable of querying massive amounts of XML data very efficiently, as proved by the experimental results we outline.