Do you experience any performance problems? If so, could you please provide us with the details, like the detailed specification of your hardware, the exact version of MonetDB/XQuery, compiler and compilation options, documents and queries?
My first experiments were done on an old Compaq Proliant 3000 with a 350 Mhz Pentium II processor and 128 Mb memory, running Fedora Core 3. I loaded 10 dictionary documents with a total size of 146 Mb. Retrieving the headwords from that file took about 2 minutes. Full text searches were slower and searching on attributes did not finish. As MonetDB was designed for high-performance I became suspicious, not only about the machine, but also about my queries. E.g. I had to loop over all the documents and I wonder if this could be a drawback. So I 'glued' the documents together and loaded that single file. But from a performance point of view it didn't make much difference.
I have now transferred my experiments to a 2.8 GHz Pentium machine with 1 Gb of memory, also running Fedora Core 3, and that's much better with respect to performance. The complete (WNT) dictionary is now loaded, 40 files, total size c. 450 Mb.
To give some more background information: we are currently in the process of selecting an xml database system for our dictionary data: Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT, Dictionary of the Dutch Language), Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch and General Dutch Dictionary (ANW). Requirements are (amongst others): good performance especially for full text searches e.g. searching for a word(s) in a sense or citation) and the ability to cooperate with xml editors like XMLSpy.
Peter