Hello Christian, thanks for your very fast reply (in middle of the night...)
Indeed the query you gave me runs much faster.
But...
1) that's not my query: I was using 'all words', and my query still runs without index.
2) I think that 'text() 'is not equivalent to '.'.
For example I could not use text() here
       //SPEECH[ . contains text  "romeo juliet" all words]
  By the way, this query just doesn't work (while it should return 42 hits).
Never mind, I am sure you will fix that soon.
Cheers.
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Christian Grün 
<christian.gruen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Thomas,
your query will be evaluated much faster if you rewrite it to..
  //LINE[ text() contains text  "romeo juliet"]
This query should take ~3-5 ms on the 7.5mb Shakespeare instance.
You can have a look into our XQuery documentation
(http://basex.org/xquery, Section »Query Evaluation«) to get more
insight on query compilation and how to utilize the index structures.
Hope this helps,
Christian