[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
I second Jeni's opinion. More than one of our developers has questioned
the claim that optimizations based on schema based static & dynamic
typing in XQuery et al will buy any significant gains perfromance-wise
and in fact may hurt it in simple cases.
--
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM
The meek shall inherit the Earth....if that's all right with the rest of
you.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeni Tennison [mailto:jeni@jenitennison.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 9:22 AM
> To: Robin Berjon
> Cc: Paul Prescod; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
>
> Hi Robin,
>
> > I don't believe that either and I'd add that it takes a
> pretty narrow
> > view on XML but I can in fact see use cases for having
> access to types
> > in XPath. For instance when I see an XSLT processor chew
> for several
> > minutes on a very predictable document (granted, it's Java
> based, but
> > still) I think that if it had access to schema information it could
> > optimize a lot of what it's doing by skipping entire subtrees.
>
> I know that's something that people claim quite a lot, but I
> don't think that it's at all easy for an implementation to
> carry out that level of optimisation, and I'm skeptical about
> whether you would actually get the speed-up you're looking for.
>
> Unless you've got really complicated stylesheets, a large
> proportion of the time spent by an XSLT processor will be on
> parsing and building up the node tree, especially if the
> document is so large that it has to start swapping in order
> to find enough memory to store it. Having a schema available
> will not help at this level.
>
> [If this is what's causing the slow-down (you should be able
> to tell from the timing information your processor gives you)
> I think that a better approach is to plug a SAXFilter into
> your pipeline that does the filtering out of the subtrees
> that you're not interested in.]
>
> Then, as with all these kinds of optimisations, there's the
> question of whether the time taken to perform the inferencing
> required to do the optimisation is actually less than the
> time it's currently taking to do the processing. I'd argue
> that in a well-designed stylesheet (one that didn't apply
> templates to or otherwise visit the nodes in the subtrees you
> want to ignore), the optimisation won't gain you much, if
> anything. And it might bring you additional problems, such as
> the famous optimising-away of tests that can't possibly be
> true according to the schema.
>
> > My issue here is that typing should be an option, available
> to those
> > that want it but not enforced upon others. XML Schema has too many
> > issues to be enforced upon anyone wishing to implement simple XPath.
>
> I do agree with that. Choice between tools and technologies
> is a good thing.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeni
>
> ---
> Jeni Tennison
> http://www.jenitennison.com/
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org
> <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS
> <http://www.oasis-open.org>
>
> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
> manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
>
>
|
