Assessing XML Data Management with XMark

We discuss some of the experiences we gathered during the development and deployment of XMark, a tool to assess the infrastructure and performance of XML Data Management Systems. Since the appearance of the first XML database prototypes in research institutions and development labs, topics like validation, performance evaluation and optimization of XML query processors have received significant interest. The XMark benchmark follows a tradition in database research and provides a framework to assess the abilities and performance of XML processing system: it helps users to see how a query component integrates into an application and how it copes with a variety of query types that are typically encountered in real-world scenarios. To this end, XMark offers an application scenario and a set of queries; each query is intended to challenge a particular aspect of the query processor like the performance of full-text search combined with structural information or joins. Furthermore, we have designed and made available a benchmark document generator that allows for efficient generation of databases of different sizes ranging from small to very large. In short, XMark attempts to cover the major aspects of XML query processing ranging from small to large document and from textual queries to data analysis and ad hoc queries.