Storing and Querying Large XML Instances

After its introduction in 1998, XML has quickly emerged as the de facto exchange format for textual data. Only ten years later, the amount of information that is being processed day by day, locally and globally, has virtually exploded, and no end is in sight. Corre-spondingly, many XML documents and collections have become much too large for being retrieved in their raw form – and this is where database technology gets into the game. This thesis describes the design of a full-fledged XML storage and query architecture, which represents the core of the Open Source database system BASEX. In contrast to numerous other works on XML processing, which either focus on theoretical aspects or practical implementation details, we have tried to bring the two worlds together: well-established and novel concepts from database technology and compiler construction are consolidated to a powerful and extensible software architecture that is supposed to both withstand the demands of complex real-life applications and comply with all the intricacies of the W3C Recommendations. In the Storage chapter, existing tree encodings are explored, which allow XML document