ESTIMATING THE COST OF XML OPERATORS FOR BINARY XML STORAGE

Techniques for estimating the cost of processing a database statement that includes one or more path expressions are provided. One aspect of cost is I/O cost, or the cost of reading data from persistent storage into memory according to a particular streaming operator. Binary-encoded XML data is stored in association with a synopsis that summarizes the binary-encoded XML data. The synopsis includes skip length information for one or more elements and indicates, for each such element, how large (e.g., in bytes) the element is in storage. The skip length information of a particular element thus indicates how much data may be skipped during I/O if the particular element does not match the path expression that is input to the streaming operator. The skip length information of one or more elements is used to estimate the cost of processing the database statement.