The code to compile XQuery into Java has now advanced sufficiently that I can run all the XMark benchmark queries, producing correct results, and reproducing the Saxon-SA join optimizations. First results are shown below: there's clearly room for further work in some areas, but overall it's an encouraging milestone. All timings in milliseconds, to run the query on a 12Mb data file

Query  Saxon-B  Saxon-SA  compiled
  q1     6.6        6.8       1.8
  q2     6.0        5.8       4.4
  q3    22.0       19.4      14.8
  q4    21.8       21.2      17.0
  q5     6.8        4.6       3.8
  q6     4.4        2.6       4.6
  q7    32.6       20.2      34.5
  q8 12217.7       56.3      21.6
  q9 16700.7       81.5      47.5
 q10  1735.7      163.9     265.3
 q11 12528.0     4256.3    6049.0
 q12  3234.7     1418.7    2697.0
 q13     3.2        2.6       2.6
 q14   152.2      106.7     115.8
 q15     4.8        3.2       3.6
 q16     8.4        7.8       4.0
 q17    11.6       10.4       6.6
 q18    11.2        9.0       8.2
 q19    65.5       58.7     125.2
 q20    34.9       27.6      24.6

These figures are very preliminary. With some of them there's very little scope for further improvement (the compiled code for count(/a/b/c/) is about as good as it's going to get, and the only way to make further improvements is for the compiler to penetrate deeper than the object model and serialization interfaces that the compiled code currently invokes. But there's no reason why any of the figures for compiled code should be slower than the interpreted figures. The results for Q8 and Q9 are the most encouraging, because these rely very heavily on optimization. In fact it's generally true that the more complex the query, the bigger the potential gains.

There are a couple of outliers here. Q19 is the only query in XMark that does sorting, and that's clearly an area that needs attention. Q6 and Q7 are both dominated by a count(). Q10, 11, and 12 are probably dominated by conversion of untyped values to typed values in filter predicates (the XMark benchmark is schemaless, which makes it very frustrating to work with at times, because there would be so many ways of speeding it up if source changes to the queries were allowed!)

I'll come back with progress reports as these numbers improve. I don't expect to achieve the same kind of speed-up as with the Knight's Tour (a factor of 7) because with these queries, far more of the time is spent in reading the input data, and there's a limit to how fast that can go. A factor of 2 for the more complex queries remains a reasonable goal.

It's worth noting that all these figures are very competitive with those reported by other vendors. Compare with the 11Mb database results at http://monetdb.cwi.nl/XQuery/Overview/Benchmark/XMark/ - the Q9 figure, for example, is 1000 times better than two of the competitive systems cited.