XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

3.2. Features

In this section we discuss some of the key features of eXist—namely, schema-less data storage, collections, index-based query processing, and XPath extensions for performing full-text searches.

3.2.1. Schema-less XML Data Storage

eXist provides schema-less storage of XML documents. Documents are not required to have an associated schema or document type definition. In other words, they are allowed to be well formed only. This has some major benefits: Besides the fact that one usually finds a lot of documents without a valid document type definition, many XML authors typically tend to create the DTD or schema after writing the document to which it applies. In practice, DTDs may also evolve over a longer period of time, so documents ...