As the popularity of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) keeps growing rapidly, the management of XML compliant structured-document databases has become a very interesting and compelling research area. Query optimization for XML structured-documents stands out as one of the most challenging research issues in this area because of the much enlarged optimization (search) space, which is a consequence of the intrinsic complexity of the underlying data model of XML data. We therefore propose to apply deterministic transformations on query expressions to most aggressively prune the search space and fast achieve a sufficiently improved alternative (if not the optimal) for each incoming query expression. This idea is not just exciting but practically attainable. This paper first provides an overview of our optimization strategy, and then focuses on the key implementation issues of our rule-based transformation system for XML query optimization in a database environment. The performance results we obtained from experimentation show that our approach is a valid and effective one.