When people ask what performance benefits they can expect from using schema-aware transformations and queries, I've often replied in a way that avoids setting expectations too high. Some queries can benefit significantly, others actually slow down because the extra cost of validating the input is not recovered by improvements in query execution speed. I've often stressed that the main benefit of schema-awareness is in the speed and ease of debugging and testing the query, not primarily in performance. But I've been taking another look at it, and I think I can probably start to be a bit more up-beat...   more »