XML data sources are gaining popularity in the context of Business Intelligence and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications, due to the amenities of XML in representing and managing complex and heterogeneous data. However, XML-native database systems currently suffer from limited performance, both in terms of volumes of manageable data and query response time. Therefore, recent research efforts are focusing on horizontal fragmentation techniques, which are able to overcome the above limitations. However, classical fragmentation algorithms are not suitable to control the number of originated fragments, which instead plays a critical role in data warehouses. In this paper, we propose the use of the K-means clustering algorithm for effectively and efficiently supporting the fragmentation of very large XML data warehouses. We complement our analytical contribution with a comprehensive experimental assessment where we compare the efficiency of our proposal against existing fragmentation algorithms.
 The data volume of XML repositories and the response time of query processing have become critical issues for many applications, especially for those in the Web. An interesting alternative to improve query processing performance consists in reducing the size of XML databases through fragmentation techniques. However, traditional fragmentation definitions do not directly apply to collections of XML documents. This work formalizes the fragmentation definition for collections of XML documents, and shows the performance of query processing over fragmented XML data. Our prototype, PartiX, exploits intra-query parallelism on top of XQuery-enabled sequential DBMS modules. We have analyzed several experimental settings, and our results showed a performance improvement of up to a 72 scale up factor against centralized databases. XML is widely praised for its flexibility in allowing repeated and missing sub-elements. However, this flexibility makes it challenging to develop a bulk algebra, which typically manipulates sets of objects with identical structure. A set of XML elements, say of type book, may have members that vary greatly in structure, e.g. in the number of author sub-elements. This kind of heterogeneity may permeate the entire document in a recursive fashion: e.g., different authors of the same or different book may in turn greatly vary in structure. Even when the document conforms to a schema, the flexible nature of schemas for XML still allows such significant variations in structure among elements in a collection. Bulk processing of such heterogeneous sets is problematic.In this paper, we introduce the notion of logical classes (LC) of pattern tree nodes, and generalize the notion of pattern tree matching to handle node logical classes. This abstraction pays off significantly in allowing us to reason with an inherently heterogeneous collection of elements in a uniform, homogeneous way. Based on this, we define a Tree Logical Class (TLC) algebra that is capable of handling the heterogeneity arising in XML query processing, while avoiding redundant work. We present an algorithm to obtain a TLC algebra expression from an XQuery statement (for a large fragment of XQuery). We show how to implement the TLC algebra efficiently, introducing the nest-join as an important physical operator for XML query processing. We show that evaluation plans generated using the TLC algebra not only are simpler but also perform better than those generated by competing approaches. TLC is the algebra used in the T imber [8] system developed at the University of Michigan. XML is increasingly used not only for data exchange but also to represent arbitrary data sources as virtual XML repositories. In many application scenarios, fragments of such repositories are distributed over the Web. However, design and query processing models for distributed XML data have not yet been studied in detail. The goal of this paper is to study the design and management of distributed XML repositories. Following the well-established concepts of vertical and horizontal data fragmentation schemes for relational databases, we introduce a flexible distribution design approach for XML repositories. We provide a comprehensive data allocation model with a particular focus on storage efficient index structures. These index structures encode global path information about XML fragment data at local sites and provide for an efficient, local evaluation of the most common types of global path and tree pattern queries. Finally, we describe the basic principles of a distributed query processing model based on the concept of index shipping.