Hi everybody, the MonetDB team at CWI, The Netherlands is proud to
announce a major
release of its high-performance open-source XML database system.
MonetDB/XQuery is the *first* XML database system to provide support
for the
XQuery Update Facility (http://www.w3.org/TR/xqupdate/), being
proposed by
W3C. It supports transactional safe updates.

MonetDB/XQuery is based on the "Pathfinder" XQuery-to-Relational
Algebra compiler
developed by TU Munich and Tech.Univ. Twente (http://www.pathfinder-
xquery.org)
and powered by the MonetDB database engine (http://monetdb.cwi.nl).

Other features included in this major release:
- improved XQuery performance
- fast and flexible distributed XQuery using XRPC
- SOAP interface for calling MonetDB/XQuery
- fn:collection() support for efficiently managing large amounts of
small
XML documents
- added XQuery extensions for database management (pd:add-doc, pf:del-
doc)
- revamped website and enriched documentation

In addition, the release contains:
- BETA FEATURE: enriched SQL support (triggers, persistent stored
modules),
and next generation MonetDB 5 kernel.
- ALPHA FEATURE: structured keyword search (NEXI) with integrated
PFTIJAH
retrieval engine from Tech. Univ. Twente
(http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~hiemst...ers/osir06.pdf)