eXist 1.2.6 Maintenance Release

eXist 1.2.6 is another maintenance release, containing fixes for critical stability issues we found while working on the 1.3 branch. Important changes include:

  • automatic document defragmentation could have unpredictable results if nodes were updated during a query
  • Java service wrapper sometimes killed eXist too early, causing corruptions in the db (see )
  • fixed db corruption after crash recovery
  • query optimizer in some cases failed to analyze called functions, thus causing bad performance
  • fixed evaluation of positional predicates with a //n abbreviated step (which translates to /desendant-or-self::node()/n)

Like all releases in the 1.2.x series, eXist 1.2.6 is not meant to introduce new features (those are reserved for 1.3/1.4). The only new feature in 1.2.6 is support for incremental backups.

I will now continue to wrap up 1.3. We still lack documentation and there are a few regressions to fix before 1.3 can be handed out.