BaseX-Talk March 2025

basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de

17 participants
14 discussions

Incremental updates: Best practices?
by Florian Schmitt 14 Mar '25

14 Mar '25

Hi all, I’m searching for a way to apply “incremental updates” to a database. By “incremental updates”, I refer to the following situation: 1. Starting point is a database containing several xml resources, e.g. /coll1/res1.xml /coll1/res2.xml /coll2/res3.xml. 2. The update consists of a file structure like /coll1/res2.xml /coll2/res4.xml /coll3/res5.xml - so I want to update the existing resource /coll1/res2.xml and add some additional resources /coll2.res4.xml, /coll3/res5.xml. The desired result is a structure like this: /coll1/res1.xml (untouched) /coll1/res2.xml (updated) /coll2/res3.xml (untouched) /coll2/res4.xml (added) /coll3/res5.xml (added) Using the command line client and the “ADD” command, I’m able to apply the update content in a single step, but (as the documentation predicted) /coll1/res2.xml now appears twice. This isn’t the desired result - /coll1.res2.xml should be overwritten by the content of / coll1.res2.xml from the update. Using the command line client and the “PUT” command replaces / coll1.res2.xml and adds the additional resource. But it deletes / coll1/res1.xml and /coll2/res3.xml - again, not the desired result, since resources missing in the update should simply be kept untouched. In my real use case, the initial dataset contains about 18,000 resources, updates may contain hundreds of updated or new resources, so separating ADD and PUT operations manually isn't possible. A simply but ugly solution would be to keep the initial set of resources in the file system, "apply" the update there and import the complete set of files as new Database. Another solution would be to write a dedicated xquery that checks for each single resource to apply a PUT or ADD operation. Is there a better way for such a use case? Florian

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Upgrading BaseX
by Csaba Fekete 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

Hi all, What is the best way to upgrade BaseX on a production server? My current version is 11.1 and I'd like to upgrade to the latest. My gut feeling is that all it takes to overwrite the following (and leave everything else): *bin/etc/lib/BaseX.jar* ... and then restart the http server. Any thoughts? Thanks

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Re: Performance tuning
by Christian Grün 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

Hi Csaba (cc to the list), You already found the reason for the excessive memory consumption by yourself. If you don’t need to rely on the pathological element names, you can replace them with a simple <i/> element, e.g. as follows: let $file := file:base-dir() || 'SPANYOLORSZÁG.xml' return file:write-text-lines( 'normalized-' || $file, file:read-text-lines($file) ! replace(., '<(/?)i\d+>', '<$1i>') ) This will also reduce memory consumption quite a lot. It would be a considerable effort to change the limit for element and attribute names, and it would also increase the database size for ordinary XML input, which is it’s improbable we will touch this. However, a relatively easy exercise would be to output error messages once the limits are exceeded, and not at the very end. Best, Christian

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Copy document via REST API
by Liedtke, Alexander 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

Hello all, I am trying to copy (duplicate) an existing document via REST API, but can not get it working. I tried via POST as commands. Can somebody please provide me a working example ? My use case is simply duplicate an existing document in a databse, as a backup file. From the documentation: <add (path='...')>[input]</add>, I translated it to xml command similar: <commands> <command>OPEN db</command> <command>ADD copy.xml source.xml</command> </commands> with diffferent variations, like adding path argument etc. However, in the end I got nothing working. I also tried it via xquery, but I would prefer xml like above. But in the end I am happy with any working example. Two more questions in that context. What is the recommended header Content-Type xml or text/plain? Does it make sense rto use the http://basex_rest_url/?command url or just the REST URL? I am pretty sure, there is an easy solution for copying documents, so any help on this is appreciated. Thank you in advance Alexander Liedtke

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BaseX-Talk March 2025