With the growing importance of XML in data exchange, much research has been done in providing flexible query facilities to extract data from structured XML documents. In this paper, we propose ViST, a novel index structure for searching XML documents.By representing both XML documents and XML queries in structure-encoded sequences, we show that querying XML data is equivalent to finding subsequence matches. Unlike index methods that disassemble a query into multiple sub-queries, and then join the results of these sub-queries to provide the final answers, ViST uses tree structures as the basic unit of query to avoid expensive join operations. Furthermore, ViST provides a unified index on both content and structure of the XML documents, hence it hasa performance advantage over methods indexing either just content or structure. ViST supports dynamic index update, and it relies solely on B+Trees without using any specialized data structures that are not well supported by DBMSs. Our experiments show that ViST is effective, scalable, and efficient in supporting structural queries.
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