[xquery-talk] Re: The State of Native XML databases

[Michael Kay]

> He's dealing 
> with very large, single documents representing the 
> collaboration point and he requires a high degree of 
> concurrent access to them. We tried melding the collection 
> concept to this, but in his case he's constrained by a 
> standard schema and so shredding into sets of smaller 
> documents would not work. Hence the document is the database, in this use
case. 

Some XML databases work well with this "document is the database" scenario,
some work extremely badly. Many are optimized to work with zillions of small
documents rather than a few very large ones. Just one of the points you need
to bear in mind when choosing or evaluating a product. Some reviewers have
mistakenly stated that particular products are unsuitable for enterprise
workloads when what they meant was that they couldn't handle data organized
in this particular way.

Generally, I think the data is likely to be more manageable if you can split
it into smallish documents, but I know that's not always possible.

The collection concept, of course, is designed for the scenario where the
data is split over many documents.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/