ad 1) Yes - but querying a huge number of documents that have no schema - and therefore no index may take some time !
And fast queries and huge number of docs are usually the reason for having a DB in the first place;-)
ad)2 Yes - in fact you always group doctypes using collections.
Great, thanks. A couple more questions for our evaluation. I appreciate the input. I wasn’t able to evaluate Tamino myself because it does not install on Windows Vista.
Does tamino support Xquery 1.0, XPath 1.0?
Does it support the notion of nested collections? Or just databases?
Does it support clustering?
How is the performance when more than 1 million documents are loaded into a database?
Does it provide user-level access control permissions? XACML?
As far as I am aware of XQuery is supported fully, never found a strange behaviour lately but with some restrictions of the position() function in paths. XPath is supported as well but for some restrictions: I never found the sibling axis but I have a workaround now (see separate posting). Can’t say much about the other questions; there is an update language comming with Tamino, I think it is XUpdate, need to check the specs for differences.
BTW you can have more than one Doctype in a collection, i.e. different schemas, XSchema is supported, as far as I know, would have to check the specs again if there are deviations.
User-level access control: I talked to other people who wanted to have some sort of permission system for every node. Is this what you mean by XACML? I don’t have these security issues in my data.
Performance: I never created real benchmarks, my collections are too small to count as challenges, but some of my queries are really challenging And the perfomance is subjectively quite impressive – in comparison to XQuery tools operating on the file system.
Hope that this experience report helps. Have fun with Tamino.