BaseX is a native and light-weight XML database management system and XQuery processor, developed as a community project on GitHub.[3] It is specialized in storing, querying, and visualizing large XML documents and collections.[4] BaseX is platform-independent and distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license.[2]
In contrast to other document-oriented databases, XML databases provide support for standardized query languages such as XPath and XQuery. BaseX is highly conformant to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications[5][6] and the official Update and Full Text extensions. The included GUI enables users to interactively search, explore and analyze their data, and evaluate XPath/XQuery expressions in realtime (i.e., while the user types).
BaseX uses a tabular representation of XML tree structures to store XML documents. The database acts as a container for a single document or a collection of documents. The XPath Accelerator encoding scheme and Staircase Join Operator have been taken as inspiration for speeding up XPath location steps.[8] Additionally, BaseX provides several types of indices to improve the performance of path operations, attribute lookups, text comparisons and full-text searches.[9]
History
BaseX was started by Christian Grün at the University of Konstanz in 2005. In 2007, BaseX went open source and has been under the BSD-3-Clause license since then.[10][11]
Supported systems
The BaseX server is a pure Java 1.8 application and thus runs on any system that provides a suitable Java implementation. It has been tested on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and OpenBSD.[12] In particular, packages are available for Debian[13] and Ubuntu.[14]
^Christian Grün; Marc Kramis; Alexander Holupirek; Marc H. Scholl; Marcel Waldvogel (30 June 2006). "Pushing XPath accelerator to its limits"(PDF). Universität Konstanz. Archived from the original(PDF) on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2011.