MSc student Luuk Peters received “green light” for his concept thesis “Battle of the bulk – Corporate XMLDB vs. Research XMLDB”. The defence is expected to take place in January 2009. This MSc research was conducted at FINAN, a company that specializes on software for financial analysis for risk management. Luuk performed extensive experiments with Oracle trying to find out how to apply its XML-support for scalable querying of XBRL documents (XBRL is an XML standard for financial reporting). Moreover, Luuk compared performance and scalability of Oracle with MonetDB/XQuery. MonetDB/XQuery clearly beats Oracle on raw performance, but when the collection of documents becomes larger than 80,000 documents (1.7GB), MonetDB/XQuery starts to give stability problems while Oracle continues to (albeit slowly) produce answers.