In Figaro documents are stored in containers, which you create and manage using XmlManager objects. Each such object can open multiple containers at a time.

Each container can hold millions of documents. For each document placed in a container, the container holds all the document data, any metadata that you have created for the document, and any indices maintained for the documents in the container.

(Metadata is information that you associate with your document that might not readily fit into the document schema itself. For example, you might use metadata to track the last time a document was modified instead of maintaining that information from within the actual document.)

XML documents may be stored in Figaro containers in one of two ways:

• Whole Documents. Documents are stored in their entirety. This method works best for smaller documents (under 1MB in size).
• Document nodes. Documents as nodes are broken down into their individual document element nodes and each such node is then stored as an individual record in the container. Along with each such record, Figaro also stores all node attributes, and the text node, if any.

From an API-usage perspective, there are very few differences between whole document and node storage containers. For more information, see Container Types.

Once a document has been placed in a container, you can use XQuery to retrieve one or more documents. You can also use XQuery to retrieve one or more portions of one or more documents. Queries are performed using XmlManager objects. The queries themselves, however, limit the scope of the query to a specified list of containers or documents.