Toward microbenchmarking XQuery

A substantial part of the database research field focusses on optimizing XQuery evaluation. However, there is a lack of tools allowing 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 the first to give an overview of a large subset of the open source XQuery implementations in terms of performance. Several specific XQuery features are tested for each engine on the same hardware to give an impression of the strengths and weaknesses of that implementation. This paper aims at guiding implementors in benchmarking and improving their products.