BaseX-Talk

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7 participants
5254 discussions

Typos in BaseX documentation
by Amanda Galtman 09 Aug '24

09 Aug '24

Hi, BaseX team. I found a couple of typos in the BaseX documentation. I wouldn't mind fixing them myself if I knew how to do so in the new RESTXQ format. Is the source in GitHub, and are BaseX users encouraged to contribute corrections to the documentation? Here are the details, in case you'd rather fix them yourself. Typo 1: The page https://docs.basex.org/main/Standard_Functions starts with a stray "f" ("fThis page presents") Typo 2: On the page https://docs.basex.org/main/File_Functions, the following example is missing a closing curly brace before the final parenthesis: file:write('data.bin', xs:hexBinary('414243'), { 'method': 'basex') Thanks, Amanda

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Ignoring non-fatal XML syntax issues in third-party HTML from command line
by Ross Goldberg 08 Aug '24

08 Aug '24

I am trying to use an xpath passed to basex on the macOS command line to extract data from a downloaded third-party HTML file. The file isn't completely valid xml syntax (but only in elements that aren't referenced by my xpath), so basex outputs errors instead of the data that I want. How can I configure basex to ignore xml syntax issues that aren't fatal for my xpath? If it cannot be so configured: - could that option be added as a new feature? - in the meantime, what other macOS command-line xpath parsers can ignore non-fatal XML syntax issues? Which of those support the newest versions of xpath, are performant, etc.? Thanks. Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

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Performance & scaling
by Csaba Fekete 29 Jul '24

29 Jul '24

Hi I have read the Advanced User Guide section in the documentation and I got a lot of useful information but I'm still a little bit stuck. I have large (1 GB+) mostly single document databases and complex queries that often take too long to execute. Apart from optimizing the queries, what are my options to speed things up? Any ideas are welcome. 1) Vertical scaling - how does a single BaseX instance respond to adding more CPUs or RAM? Which one could improve performance? Apart from indexing, are there any fine-tuning options that could help improve performance? 2) Partitioning: would it make sense to break my documents into several smaller ones, run the queries against them in parallel and then merge the results? Has anyone done such optimization? Did it work? 2) Horizontal scaling: the docs read: *"The BaseX client-server architecture offers ACID-safe transactions, with multiple readers and writers."* - Where can I get a guide on how to set up a single writer - multiple readers architecture? Thank you Csaba

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Duplicate IDs and function id()
by Andrew Sales 26 Jul '24

26 Jul '24

Hello, If I understand the spec for this function[1] correctly, at most one element should be returned for a given ID value: "If several elements have the same ID value, then E is the one that is first in document order." ("Rules", item 3) BaseX behaves differently from e.g. Saxon in this respect. The query: let $doc := document{<foo xml:id='a1'><bar xml:id='a1'/></foo>} return ( 'Saxon-HE 11.6:', xslt:transform($doc, <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=" http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" exclude-result-prefixes="xs" version="3.0"> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:sequence select="id('a1')"/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>), 'BaseX 10.7:', $doc/id('a1') ) returns: Saxon-HE 11.6: <foo xml:id="a1"><bar xml:id="a1"/></foo> BaseX 10.7: <foo xml:id="a1"><bar xml:id="a1"/></foo> <bar xml:id="a1"/> i.e. Saxon returns only the first in document order, whereas BaseX returns both of them. Grateful for your thoughts, Andrew [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions-31/#func-id

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BaseX 9.7 to BaseX 11: find a regex in an external file
by Josselin Morvan 19 Jul '24

19 Jul '24

Hi Everyone, I'm migrating a webapp from BaseX 9.7 to BaseX 11 and I'm having a problem with a wrapper function (just a function for adding content to an xml template file) Basically, this function looks for nodes in a template.xml file that matche regex to update the content of this file. Here is a small example : template.xml <foo> <bar>{content}</bar> </foo> Query: let $file := 'template.xml' let $wrap := fn:doc($file) let $regex := '\{(.+?)\}’ (: looking for something between curly braces :) return for $node in $data//* where $node[fn:matches(text(), $regex)] return $node This function worked with BaseX 9.7, but returns an error with BaseX 11 : [XPTY0004] Item expected, sequence found: ("
 ", "
"). However, if I put the content of template.xml in a variable, it works (even with BaseX 11): let $wrap := <foo> <bar>{{content}}</bar> (: just escaped curly braces :) </foo> let $regex := '\{(.+?)\}' return for $node in $wrap//* where $node[fn:matches(text(), $regex)] return $node (:<bar>{content}</bar>:) Do you have any idea of what I'm doing wrong or what I’m missing? Thanks for your help! Best, Josselin

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Server becomes unresponsive after several large database updates (db:delete())
by Eliot Kimber 17 Jul '24

17 Jul '24

(Using 10.7 on Centos): I have some databases with many large documents (1000s of docs ranging from 6KB to 2MB). I need to clean out older files, so I wrote this simple query, which looks at the time stamps in the doc filenames: let $db := '_valrep_validation_reports_internal' let $paths := (db:open($db)/* ! db:path(.)[matches(., '2024-0[123456]')] => sort()) return for $path in $paths return db:delete($db, $path) With only the dba app deployed, I ran this query on the four databases and it ran in a few seconds and removed the files as expected, but then I ran it on one more database and the query never returned and the dba app became unresponsive (Databases view doesn’t refresh). On the server I can see that a Java process, which can only be BaseX on this server, is at 100%: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 8376 eliot.k+ 20 0 9251688 1.1g 16124 S 101.0 3.5 14:02.42 java What would cause this kind of behavior? Cheers, E. _____________________________________________ Eliot Kimber Sr Staff Content Engineer Digital Content & Design O: 512 554 9368 M: 512 554 9368 servicenow.com<https://www.servicenow.com> LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicenow> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/servicenow> | YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/user/servicenowinc> | Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/servicenow>

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Query optimization: What can I check or measure?
by Eliot Kimber 16 Jul '24

16 Jul '24

I am loading page view data exported from Adobe as CSV as XML with a structure like: <csv timestamp="2024-01-24"> <record language="en-US" family="vancouver" bundlename="bundle-platcap-platform-capabilities" topicpath="administer/general/concept/capabilities-bundle-landingpage.dita" notviewed="viewed" viewcount="120587"> <entry name="URL">docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/administer/ge…</entry> <entry name="Page Views">120587</entry> <entry name="Unique Visitors">50863</entry> <entry name="Bounce Rate">0.255523003</entry> <entry name="Content Velocity">3.289644475</entry> <entry name="Docs Engagement Rate">0.289549233</entry> </record> … 50K more records … </csv> For this database I have a token index and the MAXLEN value is set to 255 to ensure that the @topicpath values will be tokenized (none should be longer than 255). I’m measuring a consistent 0.3 seconds for this query: let $docRecords as element()* := db:token($analyticsmgmt:analyticsDatabase, $docPath, 'topicpath')/.. Where $docPath is a value that will match tokens in the @topicpath attribute. Based on other token-based optimizations I’ve done, I would expect faster results, at least 10-times faster. My questions: 1. What can I look for that might be making this lookup slower than expected or, conversely, how can I prove that this is the fastest the query will return? 2. Is there a better way to manage this kind of tabular data with many 1000s of records within BaseX? For example, does it matter if the records are part of a single document or would it be better to have each record be a separate document? Thanks, Eliot _____________________________________________ Eliot Kimber Sr Staff Content Engineer Digital Content & Design O: 512 554 9368 M: 512 554 9368 servicenow.com<https://www.servicenow.com> LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicenow> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/servicenow> | YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/user/servicenowinc> | Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/servicenow>

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How can I reset my password for the basex website?
by Ben Engbers 16 Jul '24

16 Jul '24

I wanted to add a link in the server clients page for my C++ shared lib but iIt seems that my password has changed. When trying to login I only see a message that I should check my login data. How can I reset that password? Ben Ben Engbers

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Puzzled by timing difference of two similar queries
by Bernhard Liebl 16 Jul '24

16 Jul '24

Hello, as a rather unexperienced xquery and basex user, I'm puzzled by the timings of running the same xquery on two very similar xml files. For an academic paper, I'm trying to benchmark finding certain successive (windowed) <item> tags inside a <seq> tag. This is the full query: declare function local:check-sequence($items as element(item)*) as element(item)* { if ($items[1]/@x = $items[2]/@x and $items[2]/@x = $items[3]/@x) then if (sum($items/@y) < 0.5) then $items else () else () }; for $seq in doc("data.xml")//seq return <seq>{ for $i in 1 to (count($seq/item) - 2) let $window := subsequence($seq/item, $i, 3) return <match>{local:check-sequence($window)}</match> }</seq> Here's the puzzling thing. When I run this on an xml file that has one <seq> with 10000 <item>s, i.e. <seqs><seq> <item>[*10000] </seq></seqs>, I get the following reasonable timings: - Parsing: 0.63 ms - Compiling: 0.95 ms - Optimizing: 30.59 ms - Evaluating: 11.48 ms - Printing: 0.61 ms - Total Time: 44.27 ms However, once I run the same query on an xml file with two (!) <seq> of 10000 items each, the runtime does not double, but is now more than 50 times of that of the first query: - Parsing: 0.6 ms - Compiling: 1.3 ms - Optimizing: 48.13 ms - Evaluating: 2843.67 ms - Printing: 1.12 ms - Total Time: 2894.82 ms I don't see how I induce any exponential runtimes, and esp. check-sequence should be constant. Am I missing something fundamental here? The result size of the second version is about twice the size as the result size of the first version. Thanks in advance for any pointers. Bernhard Liebl

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A new C++ client
by Ben Engbers 16 Jul '24

16 Jul '24

Before I started developing the R client for BaseX several years ago, I used to program regularly in SWI-Prolog. And I always wondered afterwards about the possible benefits of using Prolog in combination with XQuery. So after I finished developing RbaseX, I started developing ProBaseX. I did not manage to set up a connection in Swipl. Therefore, my initial plan to develop ProBasex entirely in SWI-prolog was changed to a plan to first set up a connection in C++ and then use that connection. This work eventually resulted in a linux shared library that implements the full server protocol. I will now use that library for further development work. LibBasexCpp and the test program libBasexTest.cpp are now on the Internet: https://github.com/BenEngbers/libBasexCpp I am curious to see if this library fills a need and if it makes sense to continue working on a dual platform version. Ben Engbers

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