3.3. System Architecture Overview

This section provides an overview of the eXist architecture.

3.3.1. Pluggable Storage Backends

Though eXist provides pluggable storage backends (see Figure 3.1), storing documents either in the internal XML store or an external relational database system (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL), it has been designed to be a pure native XML database. As a proof of concept for the indexing and storage architecture, the first releases of eXist implemented only the relational backend. These versions served as a testing platform to explore whether the basic design would meet XML database management needs. Beginning with version 0.6, the relational backend has been supplemented by a new native database backend, which has been written ...

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