BaseX

This article is about BaseX XML Database. For Basex firm, see Basex.

BaseX is a native and light-weight XML database management system and XQuery processor, developed as a community project on GitHub.^[3] It is specialized in storing, querying, and visualizing large XML documents and collections.^[4] BaseX is platform-independent and distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license.^[2]

BaseX

BaseX GUI showing an XML document in various visualizations
Original author(s)	Christian Grün
Initial release	2007
Stable release	11.5 / November 11, 2024; 9 days ago (2024-11-11)
Repository	github.com/BaseXdb/basex
Written in	Java
Platform	Java SE
Available in	English, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mongolian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish[1]
Type	XML database
License	BSD-3-Clause[2]
Website	basex.org

In contrast to other document-oriented databases, XML databases provide support for standardized query languages such as XPath and XQuery. BaseX is highly conformant to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications^[5][6] and the official Update and Full Text extensions. The included GUI enables users to interactively search, explore and analyze their data, and evaluate XPath/XQuery expressions in realtime (i.e., while the user types).

Technologies

• XPath query language
• XQuery 3.1
  • XQuery Update (W3C)
  • XQuery Full Text (W3C)
• Support for most EXPath/EXQuery modules and packaging system
• Client-Server architecture with user and transaction management and logging facilities
• APIs: RESTXQ, RESTful API, WebDAV, XML:DB, XQJ;^[7] Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python and others
• Supported data formats: XML, HTML, JSON, CSV, Text, binary data
• GUI including several visualizations: Treemap, table view, tree view, scatter plot

Database layout

BaseX uses a tabular representation of XML tree structures to store XML documents. The database acts as a container for a single document or a collection of documents. The XPath Accelerator encoding scheme and Staircase Join Operator have been taken as inspiration for speeding up XPath location steps.^[8] Additionally, BaseX provides several types of indices to improve the performance of path operations, attribute lookups, text comparisons and full-text searches.^[9]

History

BaseX was started by Christian Grün at the University of Konstanz in 2005. In 2007, BaseX went open source and has been under the BSD-3-Clause license since then.^[10][11]

Supported systems

The BaseX server is a pure Java 1.8 application and thus runs on any system that provides a suitable Java implementation. It has been tested on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and OpenBSD.^[12] In particular, packages are available for Debian^[13] and Ubuntu.^[14]

Further reading

• BaseX Talk at LinuxTag Berlin, 2011

References

1. "Translations - BaseX Documentation".
2. "BaseX Open Source". Retrieved 2021-06-28.
3. GitHub: BaseX
4. "Overview on database instances created with BaseX". Retrieved 30 June 2011.
5. "W3C: XQuery Test Suite Result Summary". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
6. "W3C: XPath and XQuery Full Text 1.0 Test Suite Result Summary". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
7. BaseX XQJ API
8. Christian Grün; Marc Kramis; Alexander Holupirek; Marc H. Scholl; Marcel Waldvogel (30 June 2006). "Pushing XPath accelerator to its limits" (PDF). Universität Konstanz. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
9. "Storing and Querying Large XML Instances" (PDF). Universität Konstanz. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
10. "BaseX 5.0: XML Database with Visual Frontend". Linux Magazine. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
11. "Open Source Kompetenzzentrum of the german Bundesverwaltungsamt" (in German). Archived from the original on 3 November 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2011.
12. "Startup - BaseX Documentation".
13. "Debian -- Package search results -- basex".
14. "basex package: Ubuntu". 25 April 2023.

External links

• Official website