Thanks Johan and Matti for useful suggestions. 

Cutting down on the chunks seems to be a viable alternative. 

It would have been nice, though,  to have a robust harvester in XQuery that could take on anything, although the recursive version works fine as long as the dataset consist of a couple of  thousand entries.

Best,
Lars

2016-05-12 8:16 GMT+02:00 Lassila, Matti <matti.j.lassila@jyu.fi>:
Hello,

If your case allows using external tools for harvesting, I can highly
recommend metha (https://github.com/miku/metha) which is a fairly full
featured command line OAI-PMH harvester.

Best regards,

Matti L.

On 11/05/16 18:31 , "basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf
of Johan Mörén" <basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf of
johan.moren@gmail.com> wrote:

>Maybe there is some other way to get the data over. I'll have a talk with
>the guys providing the OAI-endpoint.