RE: [Bodington-developers] Wildcards in search tool

[Peter C. <Pet...@me...>]

> From: Jon Maber
> >3. Bite the bullet, throw away the homebrew XML repository and use
> >somebody else's work.  My candidate would be eXist, which has much of
> >this functionality already built in to XQuery.
> >
> >		- Peter
> > =20
> >
> Or Apache Xindice? I'm not familiar with the product but one=20
> would hope=20
> that it has as much support behind it as the other Apache XML tools.=20

eXist has considerably more functionality, as it has XQuery as a query
language rather than XPath.  I have no idea of the relative performance
of the two, however.

> Before taking this radical approach it would be important to=20
> determine=20
> that the replacement would be equally capable. (E.g. capable=20
> of handling=20
> accent insensitive searching which is vital for searching non-english=20
> text by users who aren't sure how to type accented characters=20
> into the=20
> search tool or for searching text which may have optional accents or=20
> incorrect orthography, not to say Japanese text which may have been=20
> entered in either of two phonetic systems.)

I *think* http://exist.sourceforge.net/xquery.html#N10474 says eXist, at
least, can do this natively.

> It will be sad to see the XML repository go - I'm very proud of the=20
> concept of translating an object oriented XML search=20
> specification into a single SQL query.

Yep.  I was/am proud of my Prolog setof() converter, that converted
logic programming clauses into a single SQL query; but it became
redundant with optimised tuple stores.

> I'd be interested to see performance=20
> comparisons between my XML to SQL translator and a pure XML database=20
> like Xindice.

Indeed.  I suspect the greater optimisation allowed by good selection of
the on-disk storage structures will mean that the XML databases have
decent performance; but I'm not 100% convinced, and a benchmark would be
interesting.

		- Peter