Working from an Ascential 'Best Practices' guide we built all of the optional pieces as XML 'chunks' written to hashed files via the XML Output stage. Building all of the chunks was not a big deal, once we got the technique down and running them didn't take an inordinate amount of time. About half a million source rows from Oracle up into about a dozen hashed files in 15 minutes or so. Fine so far.
Last merger job is very simple - stream in staged Oracle keys, hit all the hashed files for the appropriate chunks per row in lookups from one transformer and then shove them through the XML Output stage one last time, this time as a complete document written to disk. This is the part that is mind-numbingly slow... I left it running at a whopping 5 rows per second. Granted, these are wide XML rows, but still. Jeez.
I know this is kind of nebulous, but any general tidbits people here have for dealing with these XML stages, tricks to speed the puppies up?
