What makes the differences: benchmarking XML database implementations

XML is emerging as a major standard for representing data on the World-Wide-Web. Recently, many XML storage models have been proposed to manage XML data. We propose several benchmarks including XMark and XMach in order to assess an XML database´s abilities to deal with XML queries. We report our first set of results on benchmarking a set of XML database implementations using two XML benchmarks. In general, XML data can be managed as text files, by existing DBMSs, or by the so-called native XML engines. We implemented three XML database systems. VXMLR, and XParent were built on top of RDBMS, and XBase was implemented as a native XML engine. For each approach, variations on schema mapping and storage methods were also implemented for comparison.