Michael Kay has released version 9.1.0.7 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor for Java and .NET. This is a bug fix release.
Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 9.1B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that "implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery." Saxon 9.1 SA is £300.00 payware. According to Kay,
The most obvious difference between Saxon-SA and Saxon-B is that Saxon-SA is schema-aware: it allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standing XML Schema validator.
In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions and optimizations not available in the Saxon-B product:
Saxon-SA is able to compile XQuery code directly into Java classes.
Saxon-SA has an advanced optimizer which recognizes joins in XPath expressions, XQuery FLOWR expressions, and in XSLT templates (nested
xsl:for-eachinstructions). Whereas Saxon-B always implements these as nested loops, Saxon-SA uses a variety of strategies including indexes and hash joins. This can give dramatic improvements in execution time for large documents: some of the queries in the XMark benchmark improve by a factor of 300 (from 16 seconds to 45 milliseconds) to process a 10Mbyte source file.Saxon-SA has a facility to process large documents in streaming mode. This enables documents to be handled that are too large to hold in memory (it has been tested up to 20Gb).
Additional extensions available in Saxon-SA include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers.
