Official announcement to come shortly!

International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently: Overcoming Limits on Space, Time, or Bandwidth

Monday August 10, 2009 Hotel Europa, Montréal, Canada

Chair: Michael Kay, Saxonica

Developers have said it: "XML is too slow!", where "slow" can mean many things including elapsed time, throughput, latency, memory use, and bandwidth consumption. The aim of this one-day symposium is to better understand these problems and to explore and share approaches to solving them.

XML has become so ubiquitous that people are trying to apply it in some very hostile environments. From small mobile and embedded devices to web servers and financial messaging gateways delivering thousands of transactions a second, from terabyte-sized (or infinite) documents to databases that contain zillions of tiny documents, people expect XML to sit quietly in the background and not make a nuisance of itself. Yet some of the current technologies don't scale particularly well: XSLT and XQuery, for example, can quickly run out of memory as document sizes increase, while the costs of getting XML in and out of databases can bring a system to a halt.

XML processing efficiency MIGHT be improved with streaming transformations and queries, faster parsing, document projection, parallel processing, application-specific optimization, and many other techniques. In this symposium, we'll talk about state of the art in any or all of these areas, focussing on what impact such techniques can have at a system level: what practical effect they might have on the performance problems faced by real user workloads, or on the ability of XML to reach into areas where the costs have previously been prohibative.

Can performance benefits be achieved without sacrificing the good things about XML: validation, flexibility, high level declarative programming? In the best Balisage tradition, our aim is to bring together theory and practice: researchers, product engineers, academics, developers, and users. We all have a lot to learn from each other, and this Symposium offers a unique opportunity to introduce the people who know the problem to the people who think they know the answer.