Configures the storage back-end.

Default settings for the serializer (external data representation).

Controls the indexing process.

Configuration options related to XUpdate processing.

This attribute selects a database system type. Since relational database back-ends are no longer supported by the current release of eXist, only "native" and "native_cluster" are available.

This attribute specifies the directory where the native back-end will keep its database files, and so it is necessary that this directory exists. If a relative path is specified, it will be based on the root directory as defined in the exist.home system property. If this data directory does not have write permissions (see User Authentication and Access Control), eXist will internally switch to read-only mode such that any attempt to change the database will throw an exception.

This attribute sets the maximum amount of main memory used by all page buffers (i.e. assuming all page buffers are at full capacity). The database uses this parameter to calculate the maximum size of each internal cache. You can increase this value if your system allows for greater memory use.

The cacheSize should not be more than half of the size of the JVM heap size (set by the JVM -Xmx parameter).

This specifies the number of bytes used for internal data and B-tree pages. This should be equal to or a multiple of the page size used by the filesystem (usually a multiple of 4096).

This attribute sets the amount of free memory (expressed as a percentage of the total memory) available for the Java virtual machine, beyond which eXist will begin to flush its internal caches. During indexing, eXist caches index data in memory to avoid frequent disk look-ups (see Configuring Database Indexes). If the amount of free memory drops below the defined limit, eXist will write all cached data to disk and trigger the garbage collection.

If your database files are relatively large (i.e. > 50MB) or if you experience OutOfMemory errors during indexing, you may consider increasing this setting to > 10%.

These options specify the minimum and maximum size of the connection pool. This pool restricts the number of parallel (basic) operations that can be executed by the database. Settings should be somewhere between 1 and 20. (Please note that this has nothing to do with the HTTP and XMLRPC server settings - these servers have their own connection pools.)

This option defines how often the database will flush its internal buffers to disk (in milliseconds). The sync-thread will interrupt normal database operation after the specified time and write all dirty pages to disk.

This option specifies the maximum amount of time (in milliseconds) that the database will allow for any running processes to complete upon database shutdown.

If this attribute is set to yes, automatic recovery is enabled.

This attributes sets the maximum allowed size of the journal file. Once the journal reaches this limit, a checkpoint will be triggered and the journal will be cleaned. However, the database waits for running transactions to return before processing this checkpoint. In the event one of these transactions writes a lot of data to the journal file, the file will grow until the transaction has completed. Hence, the size limit is not enforced in all cases.

This attribute sets the directory where journal files are to be written. If no directory is specified, the default path is to the data directory.

This attribute determines whether or not to protect the journal during operating system failures. That is, it determines whether the database forces a file-sync on the journal after every commit. If this attribute is set to "yes", the journal is protected against operating system failures. However, this will slow performance - especially on Windows systems. If set to "no", eXist will rely on the operating system to flush out the journal contents to disk. In the worst case scenario, in which there is a complete system failure, some committed transactions might not have yet been written to the journal, and so will be rolled back.

This attribute sets the maximum amount of time (expressed in milliseconds) that the query can take before it is killed..

This attribute limits the size of XML fragments constructed using XQuery, and thus sets the maximum amount of main memory a query is allowed to use. This limit is expressed as the maximum number of nodes allowed for an in-memory DOM tree. The purpose of this option is to avoid memory shortages on the server in cases where users are allowed to run queries that produce very large output fragments.

This attribute is required, and specifies a Java class name used to implement the org.exist.security.SecurityManager interface, as in the following example:

eXist is distributed with the following built-in security manager implementations:

Password encoding can be set to one of the following types:

1. plain - Applies plain encryption.

2. md5 (default) - Applies the MD5 algorithm to encrypt passwords.

3. simple-md5 - Applies a simplified MD5 algorithm to encrypt passwords.

The realm to use for basic auth or http-digest password challenges.

This attribute determines whether <xinclude> tags are to be expanded during serialization. Setting the value to "false" will leave <xinclude> tags unexpanded.

This attribute (when set to "true") tells the serializer to pass its output to an XSL stylesheet when it encounters an XSL processing-instruction at the start of the document.

This attribute tells the serializer to add debug information to each element expressed as additional attributes. This information includes the internal identifier of the node and source document. These are the accepted values:

1. all - Adds debug information to every node in the output.

2. element - Adds debug information to top-level elements only.

3. none (default) - Disables debugging feature.

The serializer defaults to pretty-print the resulting XML source code. Set this option to "no" to disable pretty-printing.

The database can highlight matches in the text content of a node by tagging the matching text string with <exist:match> . Clearly, this only works for XPath expressions using the fulltext index. Set the parameter to "yes" to disable this feature.

Matches for attribute values can also be tagged using the character sequence "||" to demarcate the matching text string. Since this changes the content of the attribute value, the feature is disabled by default.

Frequent reindexing can be avoided by leaving space between the numeric identifiers assigned to every node. Future insertions will first use these spare identifiers, and therefore the document will not need to be reindexed.

The growth-factor attribute allows the user to specify the number of spare ids to be inserted whenever the node id scheme is recomputed after an XUpdate. As discussed, increasing this setting will result in fewer reindex runs. However, be aware that by leaving spare ids, you limits the maximum size of a document that can be indexed.

This attribute defines the maximum number of page splits allowed within a document before a defragmentation run is triggered.

This attribute is for or debugging purposes only. If the parameter is set to "yes", a consistency check will be run on modified documents after every XUpdate request. This checks whether the persistent DOM is complete, and all pointers in the structural index point to valid storage addresses that contain valid nodes.

Specifies whether string comparisons are to be case-sensitive. This option applies to XPath equality tests (i.e. "=" operator), as well as functions such as contains(), starts-with() and ends-with(). Since index look-ups are NEVER case-sensitive, this setting does not apply to operators or functions of the fulltext index (e.g. "&=", "|=", "near()").

Specifies how the <indexer> is to treat whitespace at the start or end of a character sequence. This option ONLY applies to newly stored files, and therefore changing it has no effect on previously stored documents. Possible values for this attribute are:

1. leading - Suppresses leading whitespace.

2. trailing - Suppresses trailing whitespace.

3. both - Suppresses leading and trailing whitespace.

4. none - Preserves all whitespace.

This attribute invokes the Java class used to tokenize a string into a sequence of single words or tokens, which are stored to the fulltext index. Currently only the SimpleTokenizer is available.

This attribute specifies the depth of the DOM index, or the tree level up to which elements will be added to the index. For example, a value of "2" results in the document root node and all its child elements being indexed; a value of "1" only indexes the root node.

The DOM index maps unique node identifiers to the nodes' storage locations in the DOM file. Generating this index is time- and memory-consuming. It is furthermore primarily needed to access nodes by their unique node identifier - for example, when serializing XML data for query results or XUpdate - which are operations not normally considered time-critical. Moreover, most XPath expressions can do without this index since they use short-cuts to access the node directly.

Beginning with version 0.9, only top-level elements are added to the DOM index, whereas attributes and text nodes are always excluded. This results in much smaller index sizes and, consequently, a smaller dom.dbx file size. Usually, setting the index-depth to a value of "2" offers a reasonable compromise of index size and performance. However, if your documents are deeply-structured, you might consider increasing this setting to a level of 3, 4 or 5. For example, if the longest path from the document root to an element node has greater than ten node levels, an index-depth setting of 4 or 5 would probably help to increase overall query performance for some types of queries.

This attribute defines the default setting for the validation of documents by the XML parser. If it is set to "no", documents will never be validated against an existing DTD or schema. A value of "auto" will leave document validation to the SAX parser (i.e. the Xerces parser).

This preserves whitespace for mixed content. The default value is "no".