Towards microbenchmarking XQuery

A substantial part of the database research field focusses on optimizing XQuery evaluation. However, optimization techniques are rarely validated by means of cross platform benchmarking. The reason for this is that there is a lack of tools that allows one to easily compare different implementations of isolated language features. This implies that there is no overview of which engines perform best at certain XQuery aspects, which in turn makes it hard to pick a reference platform for an objective comparison. This paper is a first step in a larger effort to bring an overview of the available implementations along with their strengths and weaknesses. It is meant to guide implementors in benchmarking and improving their products. 1