Abstract: An algorithm TwigRT is proposed to improve the efficiency of twig query processing in XML database. TwigRT can store an object's properties and their value into relational tables according to the semantics defined in XML schema. Twig query is decomposed into content query and structure query, then content query is processed by execute SQL on relational tables, and structure query search scope is reduced by previous step results and can be processed using holistic join algorithm. The experimental results show that our approach is scalable and efficient on this problem.