Hi Michael,

Thanks for your suggestions, always appreciated.

• *Description for database backups*: Right now, the titles of

database backups are like "dbname-2021-02-02-17-45-44". It would be great if one could add a description to such a backup. The reason is: While developing I often update databases step by step and in between these steps, I make backups of the whole database, so in case of errors or if I have to look up something, I could revert to a former state of the database. With a meaningful description, it would be much easier to pick the right backup.

Backups are nothing else than zipped versions of single database

directories. We could think about adding something like an info.txt file. If you like, you can already to that manually after the backup has been created (but I guess it’s not that comfortable).

• *RegEx in index searches*: It would be great to have the possibility

to search for RegEx patterns in the index, e. g. like this: db:text("db-name", "REGEX-PATTERN-HERE") or db:attribute("db-name", "REGEX-PATTERN-HERE")

A challenging one, as regular expressions can be arbitrarily complex, and

expensive to evaluate. For a start, you can e.g. use index:texts and retrieve all strings that start with the specified substring…

let $terms := index:texts('db-name', 'German') return db:text('db-name', $terms)

…or even use regex (but that might be a bit slow):

let $terms := index:texts('factbook')[matches(., 'REGEX-PATTERN-HERE')] return db:text('factbook', $terms)

• *Index searches with a path*: I sometimes had the need to do an

index search within only a certain path, e. g.: db:text('db-name', '/PATH/WITHIN/DB', 'search-word') I don't know if this is even possible to realize, but if yes, it would sometimes be very useful to me.

Generic string arguments with paths are challenging, as we need to

consider things like namespaces. The easiest thing should be to manually revert your path…

db:text('db-name', 'search-word') /parent::DB /parent::WITHIN /parent::PATH[parent::document-node()]

…or, more dynamic:

let $path := '/PATH/WITHIN/DB' let $reverse-path := ( let $steps := reverse(tokenize($path, '/')[.]) return string-join( for $step in $steps return 'parent::' || $step, '/' ) || '[parent::document-node()]' ) return xquery:eval( "db:text('db-name', 'search-word')/" || $reverse-path )

• *Selective indexing based on attribute values*: It would be great to

have selective indexing based on attributes and their values. Imagine an XML structure like this:

• <items> <item name="id">ABC</item> <item name="title">XYZ</item> <item name="person">Jane Doe</item> ...

</items> If one would like to index e. g. only the ID values, a functionality to do selective indexing just for "<item>" nodes with attribute "name" that contains the value "id" would be useful. This would allow to have a comparatively small index for very large XML data sets, which could have impact on query performance.

As the requirements for custom filters are manifold, it’s difficult to

define general rules. One common solution for that is to create an additional index databases, which only contains relevant contents, or contents that have been modified in some way to make them better searchable [1].

• *Human readable execution times in GUI*: Maybe a small change but -

at least in my case - it would make developing performant xQueries much easier: Having the "Timing" section in the Info-View of the GUI display human readable times. Right now, the values are displayed only in milliseconds like 175713.28 ms. But an additional display in a more human readable format, e. g. hh:mm:ss.ms would sometimes be very useful.

Sounds reasonable and doable. I’ll think about it.

Best, Christian

[1] https://docs.basex.org/wiki/Indexes#Custom_Index_Structures