Streaming of Large Documents

Sometimes source documents are too large to hold in memory. Saxon-EE provides a range of facilities for processing such documents in streaming mode: that is, processing data as it is read by the XML parser, without building a complete tree representation of the document in memory.

Some of these facilities implement new features in the draft XSLT 3.0 standard (also known as XSLT 2.1). Some are specific to Saxon, and a few facilities are also available in XQuery.

Inevitably there are things that cannot be done in streaming mode - sorting is an obvious example. Sometimes, achieving a streaming transformation means rethinking the design of how it works - for example, splitting it into multiple phases. So streaming is rarely a case of simply taking your existing code and setting a simple switch to request streamed implementation.

There are basically two ways of doing streaming in Saxon:

Both these facilities are available in Saxon-EE only. Streamed templates also require XSLT 3.0 to be enabled by setting the relevant configuration parameters or command line options.