Techniques are provided to achieve performance improvements for path-based access to hierarchical data and for utilizing an extensible indexing framework. Extensible operators may be optimized by evaluating the operators using functions native to the database system instead of using functions defined through an extensible indexing mechanism. Furthermore, the database system may resolve a resource path of a query when the query is compiled, and may store the mapping of the resource path to one or more resources in a cursor for the query execution plan to avoid resolving the resource path each time the cursor is used to run the query. The cursor may be made dependent on the one or more resources to which the resource path refers at compile time. This takes advantage of the observation that the mapping of the resource path to particular resources rarely changes between evaluations of a particular query.