XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language

Optimization Techniques

In the three years since XSLT became a W3C Recommendation, a considerable number of implementations have appeared and have had some time to mature. Competitive comparisons of their performance have occasionally been published, which, although they suffer the same problems as all such benchmarks, have certainly spurred vendors to improve their ratings. Implementers will also have had feedback from their own users highlighting performance problems. All the products have improved significantly since their first appearance.

It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that the performance of XSLT processing is by now a fairly widely understood subject, and that the lessons learned by XSLT suppliers will be available for XQuery vendors ...