Working at MarkLogic has forced me to recalibrate my expectations around XML-related performance issues. Not to brag or anything, but it’s screaming fast. Conventional wisdom of avoiding // in paths doesn’t apply, since that’s the sort of thing the indexes are made to do, and that’s just the start. Single milliseconds are now a noteworthy amount of time for something showing up in the profiler.
This is what XML was supposed to be like. Now that XML has fallen off the hype cycle, we’re getting some serious work done. -m