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XQuery Unlocks the Power of XML

One of the most recent developments in XML is the emergence of a native XML query and transformation language – XML Query, or XQuery. XQuery is under development by the W3C and is nearing Candidate Recommendation status. Even now, XQuery is poised to become the standard query language by which enterprises access and manipulate disparate data and content repositories. With XQuery, the query and transformation logic operates on XML views of the data; it does not depend on the data’s physical structure. If this approach to data query and manipulation sounds familiar, it is: in SQL, a query describes in a declarative fashion the mapping between a set of input tables, and the output table, or result. The underlying data provider (a JDBC driver, a database client, and so on) takes the SQL and executes it against the relational database. To varying degrees, the application is thereby shielded from the underlying database platform. XQuery’s similarities to the SQL paradigm can only help speed its adoption.

One important difference is that in SQL, everything has to look like a relational table, no matter how it is stored physically. In XQuery, you can have completely different storage systems and wildly different data structures, and, as long as the underlying data can be exposed as XML, it all still works.