Sedna is a free native XML database designed to be a universal system for a wide range of XML applications such as content management, event-based SOA, etc. Sedna is a full-featured database system that provides a full range of core database services (such as transactional store and recovery) and flexible XML processing via the W3C-standard XQuery language.

* Load XML data "AS IS" with no need to adhere to any predefined schema
* Support for large (hundreds of GBs) databases
* Powerful processing facilities: XQuery, Updates, Full-text search, Integration with SQL databases, etc
* Easy to run and use

Features
Basic Features

* Available for free in open source form under Apache License 2.0
* Native XML database system implemented in C/C++
* Support for W3C XQuery language validated by W3C XQuery Test Suite
* Full-text search integrated with XQuery (based on dtSearch)
* Support for a declarative node-level update language
* Native XML data storage structures designed for efficient support for both queries and updates (no underlying relational or another DBMS). The XML data storage is based on descriptive schema (derived from data, also called DataGuide)
* Support for ACID transactions
* Efficient support for stand-alone and in-collection XML documents of unrestricted size
* Support for fine-grained XML triggers
* Structural indices (based on descriptive schema) and value indices (based on B-tree)
* Support for Perl-compatible regular expressions (based on the PCRE library)
* Support for Unicode (utf8)
* SQL connection from XQuery
* XQuery external functions implemented in C
* Database security (users, roles and privileges)
* Administration via easy-to-use command line utilities
* Supplied with extensive documentation including Quick Start

Application Programming

* Java API, C API, Scheme API (Chicken, Gambit, PLT)
* PHP API, Python API, .Net API and OmniMark API (available as third-party software)
* Open socket-base client/server protocol that allows implementing APIs for other programming languages

Extra Features

* Integration with Apache HTTP server (via Apache module)

Platforms
Sedna is designed and implemented to be portable. Now Sedna is avaliable for the following platforms:

* Linux (kernel version 2.4 or higher)
* Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista
* FreeBSD
* Mac OS (PPC/Intel)

Also known to run successfully on the following platforms:

* PowerPC at IBM RS6000 running Debian Sarge
(thanks to Philippe Guyot)