Hi all,
with version 9.0 of BaseX, texts will be better compressed than before. Short strings and whitespace text nodes will be inlined in our main storage, instead of being stored in an extra heap file as before. This will particularly be helpful when perfoming mass updates on short strings (replace 'yes' to 'no', etc.), and your future BaseX database will get even smaller [1].
Obviously, BaseX 9.0 databases cannot opened anymore with older versions. However, BaseX will be 100% backward compatible, so there will be no need to export and recreate your existing database instances. Instead, all future updates you perform will use the new compression feature; and if you run a complete optimize, all existing texts will be reduced as well.
All the best, Christian