In 2000, we have started to evaluate several XML data management systems using a newly developed benchmark called XMach-1. Its first definition occurred in Sep. 2000 when it was submitted to the BTW2001 conference. XMach-1 became the first published benchmark for XML data management. It was also for a long time the only multi-user benchmark for XML data management.

Since the first public draft of the XQuery query language for XML is published we have formulated the queries from our specification in this language.
We then updated the queries to fix some minor bugs and to reflect the changes made in the XQuery specification draft from 7 June 2001.

We have further released the complete XMach-1 benchmark reference implementation consisting of a data generator to populate the XML benchmark database and a query execution framework. Please download it here. This archive contains the sources, class files and documentation of the data generator and the generic query framework. For further information see the README file in directory doc.

Our further research on XML data management focused on extending relational databases to efficiently support the XML functionality. In particular, we developed in 2004 a new, insert-friendly numbering scheme called DLN. Within a prototype called XMLRDB we also support flexible XPath views to speed-up query processing.