Approaches are provided for improving the performance of certain database queries that operate on binary-encoded XML. In particular, the approach uses occurrence and type constraint information about XML data stored in the database for optimizing the relational rewrite of a query. Constraint information can be obtained in several different ways including through a formal language specification such as an XML Schema or DTD, through discovery of a user-provided secondary index on a an XML path table, or through a structural summary that is derived from statistical analysis on a set of XML documents stored in the database.