Hi there,
I asked something like this question last year and I'm basically checking up on the progress since then. I hope this mail is not interpreted as demanding anything; I can see you guys are doing impressive work, I'm just trying to give feedback from the perspective of an application developer drooling over the potential of XML databases..
I can see on your website that collections() support is not there yet (marked as "will", though).
I also looked at this page:
http://monetdb.cwi.nl/XQuery/Overview/Roadmap/index.html
'many small documents' is not listed on this roadmap.
On another roadmap page however:
http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Development/Roadmap/index.html
I do see the following entry (for the september release this year):
XQuery: support for large numbers of small documents
This gives me hope. :) Is that still the plan? If so, it might be useful to update the XQuery roadmap with that tidbit from the main MonetDB roadmap, as I might not be the only one who is looking for such features.
My use case is that of a CMS - large amounts of smaller XML documents that it would be nice to do efficient queries over. Updating small parts of documents (XUpdate) would be nice, but whole-document updates would be okay already, though that might actually mean something like XUpdate to you guys, as you might deal with collections internally as something close to one giant document.
Monet is tantalizing because it promises supreme xquery performance but the applications I can imagine do need support for large quantities of smaller documents. If there's a version under development somewhere that supports this feature I'd be happy to try playing with it and give some feedback.
Thanks for the attention!
Regards,
Martijn