My company is in education industry and we use XML to store course content. We also store some course related information (mostly metainfo) in relational database. Right now we are in the process of switching from our proprietary XML Schema to DocBook 5. Along with the switch we want to move course related information from database to XML files. The reason for this is to have all course data in one place and to put it under Subversion. However, we would like to keep flexibility of the relational database and be able to easily extract specific information about a course from an XML document. XQuery seems to be up to the task so I was researching databases that supports it but so far could not find what I needed. What I basically want, is to have my XML files in a certain directory structure and then on top of this I would like to have a system that would index my files and let me select anything out of any file using XQuery. This way I can have ‘my cake and eat it too’: I will have XQuery interface and still keep my files in plain text and versioned. Is there anything out there at least remotely resembling to what I want?
If you think that what I an asking for is nonsense please make an alternative suggestion.
On the related note: What XML Databases (preferably native and open source) do you have experience with and what would you recommend?
Take a look at exist, it is an open source xml database that supports XQuery.