ANSWERS to "What's wrong with XQuery" question

[Xavier Franc]

Well, I did not expect so much debate about my dumb test with count()...

Indeed it is not fair to judge a product based only on a such simple tests,
but that can gives hints about the degree of sophistication or naivety
of its
implementation and the amount of effort put into optimizing it.

I agree with Martin that lazy evaluation is quite important,
not only because it gives better results in general, but also
because it allows a better scalability in the case of databases.

In Qizx, we are in a (c) case (in Michael Kay's classification)
the count() function is optimized  on some types of sequences.
The Range expression (1 to N) is of course easy to optimize,
but more generally care is taken to optimize count() by using
database indexes when possible.


Anyway I am glad this kind of issues are debated, because I think the
question of speed and efficacy is crucial for the acceptance of XML/XQuery
databases, and we are perhaps no more at a stage where we can
still say that XML databases "will be optimized in the course of time".

-- 
Xavier Franc
Qizx design and development