Extending XQuery evaluation in parallel and distributed environment

XML has been evolved from being used for data representation to a structured document format. It has also grown in size from several bytes of small number of files to giga-or terabytes of size with millions of files. XML databases have been developed to efficiently store XML documents with XQuery as querying language from XML documents. However, they have difficulties in dealing with huge number of files and larger space, while most of XML database systems are implemented as centralized systems. Therefore, we explore possibilities to utilize distributed and parallel computing architecture in order to improve its performance. This paper describes directions and simple attempts to take advantage of distributed and parallel computing architecture by extending XQuery processor facilities. Attempts is carried out in an emerging native XML database (BaseX [1]).