RE: General Searching query

> Imagine the scene:
>
> You have around 20,000 xml files, all around 10k in size.
> You have to write
> a stylesheet that will run on IE5.5 using MSXML2.5 (possibly
> v3) that will
> search the XML files, based on a name-value pair.
>
> The solution you are looking for will be fast, and scalable
> because you know
> eventually it will have to search up to 250,000 XML files.
>
> What kind of stylesheet is best for this task??  Any ideas welcome
>
This is precisely the scenario where you need XQuery rather than XSLT.

Or perhaps, if such a thing existed, an XSLT implementation capable of
optimising queries against large databases. But there are actually good
reasons why XSLT isn't ideally suited to the task: it's very hard to do any
static analysis of the template rules in a stylesheet to work out what
indexes to use to retrieve the data. This accounts for one of the few big
differences between XSLT and XQuery.

Take a look at Tamino: www.tamino.com

Before that, of course, you need to tell the person who said it should run
under IE5.5 that it's their job to tell you the requirement, not to impose
on you an architecture that is guaranteed to fail.

Mike Kay
Software AG


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