Hi, we're currently looking for an XML database to store a variety of small-to-medium sized XML documents. The XML documents are unstructured in the sense that they do not follow a schema or DTD, and that their structure will be changing over time. We'll need to do efficient searching based on elements, attributes, and full text within text content. More importantly, the documents are mutable. We'll like to bring documents or fragments into memory in a DOM representation, manipulate them, then put them back into the database. Ideally, this should be done in a transaction-like manner. We need to efficiently serve document fragments over HTTP, ideally in a manner that allows for scaling through replication. We would prefer strong support for Java integration, but it's not a must.
Have other encountered similar problems, and what have you been using? So far, we're researching: eXist-DB (http://exist.sourceforge.net/ ), Base-X (http://www.basex.org/ ), MonetDB/XQuery (http://www.monetdb.nl/XQuery/ ), Sedna (http://modis.ispras.ru/sedna/index.html ). Wikipedia lists a few others here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_database I'm wondering to what extent systems such as Lucene, or even digital object repositories such as Fedora could be coaxed into this usage scenario. Thanks for any insight you have or experience you can share. - Godmar