Architecture - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 78

Table 4-1. Collection metadata properties

Metadata property Description

URI The URI of the collection in the database

Created Date The date and time the collection was created

Permissions

Owner The owner user of the collection

Group The owner group of the collection

Mode The security mode of the collection (e.g., rwxr-xr-x )

Access Control List The access control list for the collection

In eXist collections are identified by a hierarchical URI scheme , and are in fact hier‐
archical containers ( Figure 4-9 ). That is to say, a collection inherits all documents
from any subcollections, and the configuration of a collection is applied to all subcol‐
lections, unless it is explicitly overridden by a subcollection. If you request a collec‐
tion in eXist, you receive all of the documents in that collection, but if that collection
has subcollections, you also receive all of the documents from all of the subcollections
of that collection, and so on.

Figure 4-9. Example collection hieracrhy

Collections in eXist always start from the root collection, named db , with the
corresponding URI /db . In the example hierarchy shown in Figure 4-9 we can see the
following collections: