XXL

The eXtensible and fleXible Library XXL is a Java library that contains a rich infrastructure for implementing advanced query processing functionality. The library offers low-level components like access to raw disks as well as high-level ones like a query optimizer. On the intermediate levels, XXL provides a demand-driven cursor algebra, a framework for indexing and a powerful package for supporting aggregation. The XXL project provides various packages. See the longer introduction to XXL for an explanation of the packages.

Main Features

• A demand-driven cursor algebra including efficient implementations of object-relational operators such as joins, difference, MergeSort etc.
• An extended relational algebra based on java.sql.ResultSet
• A powerful framework of index-structures, e.g. B+tree, R-tree (linear and quadratic split Guttman et al), R*tree, RR*tree, Hilbert R-tree, R-tree (linear split Tan et al), X-tree, M-tree etc.
• A framework for processing multi-way joins including spatial, temporal, and similarity joins
• The support of raw-I/O (using JNI), an own file system implementation, and a record manager
• Skyline query R-tree extension
• MVBT (Multiversion B+Tree)-Index Implementation
• MVBT+ bulk-loading approach
• Sort-based bulk-loading methods for R-trees (including STR and GOPT approach)
• Top-down buffer tree bulk-loading of R-trees

Building

You can add the XXL library into your local maven repository by calling mvn install -DskipTests.

If you just want to generate jar files you can execute mvn package. You should find the output files in the target directory.

In order to just generate JavaDoc you can execute mvn javadoc:javadoc. The target/apidocs directory should now contain the JavaDoc HTML pages.

To execute the tests you can call mvn test. Now maven will run all testNG testcases for XXL.

Using

All classes of XXL are documented in detail, containing examples in the JavaDoc. The latest version of the documentation is here. You can also look at the test cases how the different data structures were used there. Additionally, you can find use cases separately in xxl-usecases that simplify their understanding.

Papers

• Michael Cammert, Christoph Heinz, Jürgen Krämer, Martin Schneider, Bernhard Seeger:
  A Status Report on XXL - a Software Infrastructure for Efficient Query Processing. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 26(2): 12-18 (2003)

• Jochen Van den Bercken, Björn Blohsfeld, Jens-Peter Dittrich, Jürgen Krämer, Tobias Schäfer, Martin Schneider, Bernhard Seeger:
  XXL - A Library Approach to Supporting Efficient Implementations of Advanced Database Queries. VLDB 2001: 39-48

• Jochen Van den Bercken, Jens-Peter Dittrich, Bernhard Seeger:
  javax.XXL: A prototype for a Library of Query processing Algorithms. SIGMOD Conference 2000: 588

Contributing to the XXL-Project

Since we consider XXL as a toolbox for the entire community, we would be pleased to get feed-back from research projects that use the functionality of XXL. In particular, we encourage people, who have extended the functionality of XXL, to attach their code to our release in a supplement package.

License

All versions of XXL are freely available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.