RE-tree: an efficient index structure for regular expressions

Due to their expressive power, Regular Expressions (REs) are quickly becoming an integral part of language specifications for several important application scenarios. Many of these applications have to manage huge databases of RE specifications and need to provide an effective matching mechanism that, given an input string, quickly identifies the REs in the database that match it. In this paper, we propose the RE-tree, a novel index structure for large databases of RE specifications. Given an input query string, the RE-tree speeds up the retrieval of matching REs by focusing the search and comparing the input string with only a small fraction of REs in the database. Even though the RE-tree is similar in spirit to other tree-based structures that have been proposed for indexing multi-dimensional data, RE indexing is significantly more challenging since REs typically represent infinite sets of strings with no welldefined notion of spatial locality. To address these new challenges, our R...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Chee Yong Chan, Minos N. Garofalakis, Rajeev Rastogi
• Keywords: Database, RE-tree Index Structure, RE-tree Nodes, Various Re-tree Operations, VLDB 2003