Hi there,

We use Tomcat + Cocoon + eXist for all our significant P5 (and P4) 
projects. eXist is already stable, fast and capable of handling large 
document collections. It's also very close to complete compliance with 
the XQuery specification ("According to the official XQuery test suite, 
eXist passes 99.4%, i.e. 14544 out of 14637 tests", says the latest 
release note), so you should be able to base projects on it without 
being locked in for the future. I think all issues of scale and 
concurrency are basically processor and memory resource issues at this 
stage; the more hardware you throw at it, the more it'll handle.

Cheers,
Martin

Joe Wicentowski wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Have members here had much experience with eXist as a native XML
> database platform for TEI (P5) databases?
> 
> I have heard that eXist has had issues with performance with large
> amounts of data and numbers of simultaneous users, but that recent
> versions have addressed those concerns.  Is that true?  Have you hit
> limits on what eXist can handle?  In particular, are there limits to
> threading, the number/size of documents, engine performance?  Do you
> think eXist is 'ready' for prime time use?
> 
> Can you recommend examples of eXist-based TEI databases that have a
> large body of data and/or number of users?  (Even better, are there
> usage statistics?)  I've seen the examples listed at
> http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/EXist#Sample_implementations - but
> it's difficult to tell the volume of data and usage that they get.
> 
> Basically, I'd like to avoid getting too committed to eXist, just to
> find out that I hit a performance wall and need to go with a
> commercial implementation such as Mark Logic.  (My database will start
> with about fifty 800+page digitized volumes and eventually hold up to
> 400+ volumes, and it should support 15-50 simultaneous users.)
> 
> Thanks for any guidance you might have!
> Joe

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
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Half-Baked Software, Inc.
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