Re: use XSLT or XQuery in Saxon?

On Thursday 06 January 2005 06:53, alan m wrote:

> I have extremely large (over 300 MB) XML file and tens
> of thousands of small xml files generated after
> applying various XSLT on the one big XML file.

I don't know whether Mr Kay have tested Saxon with 100+MB files or not, but we 
did (6.5.?), and could not get a simple transform to complete within hours (I 
think we gave up after ~4hours on a 80-100MB file), on a machine with 1GB of 
RAM.

I wrote a custom transformer in Java doing exactly what we needed using;
 *  SAX events
 *  Only keeping one branch/leaf of the XML tree in memory at any time.
 *  Aggregation of content into small mutable value objects, which were output 
and discarded when completed.

1500 files, varying from 360MB to ~10MB of a total of ~10GB could be processed 
in a linear speed of ~2MB per second, or close to the disk drive speed, on a 
dual CPU workstation.

I suspect that you will end up in 'custom transformer' territory, but perhaps 
Saxon has improved and can deal with the transforms you give it. I suggest 
that you make some simple tests first, which somewhat ressemble what you need 
to do later.


Cheers
Niclas
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