Schema-independent querying for heterogeneous collections in NoSQL document stores

NoSQL document stores are well-tailored to efficiently load and manage massive collections of heterogeneous documents without any prior structural validation. However, this flexibility becomes a serious challenge when querying heterogeneous documents, and hence the user has to build complex queries or reformulate existing queries whenever new schemas are introduced in a collection. In this paper we propose a novel approach, based on formal foundations, for building schema-independent queries which are designed to query multi-structured documents. We present a query enrichment mechanism that consults a pre-constructed dictionary. This dictionary binds each possible path in the documents to all its corresponding absolute paths in all the documents. We automate the process of query reformulation via a set of rules that reformulate most document store operators, such as select, project, unnest, aggregate and lookup. We then produce queries across multi-structured documents which are compatible with the native query engine of the underlying document store. To evaluate our approach, we conducted experiments on synthetic datasets. Our results show that the induced overhead can be acceptable when compared to the efforts needed to restructure the data or the time required to execute several queries corresponding to the different schemas inside the collection. •Document stores offer the flexibility to store documents with heterogeneous schemas.•Querying document stores requires complex queries to overcome schemas heterogeneity.•We propose to build queries over partial paths, regardless of documents schemas.•We formally define the reformulation of such queries for most document operators.•Queries are extended using a dictionary to bind paths to all existing absolute paths.