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Vendor Solutions for the Future XQuery World are Emerging

For example, products that can provide unified data access across XML and relational data, like Data Direct XQuery™ from DataDirect Technologies, will be in high demand by developers tasked with assembling XQuery-based data services. A related specification – XQuery API for Java, XQJ – will provide a standard interface for easily embedding these XQuery programs in any Java program, much like JDBC does for SQL.

Of course, performance will be another key factor in XQuery’s adoption. Performance of data integration logic can be unacceptable in many cases due to the excessive network traffic and local memory consumption needed to process queries across disparate data sources. There are many products on the market today that deal with this problem by offering server-based solutions that separate the data integration logic from the application. Many of these platforms are XML-aware and have plans for supporting XQuery.

For example, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle have all staked out a position in the XML world that by morphing their respective databases at the API level, their platforms can easily serve as big and fast file servers for any data type. In this world, XQuery is a natural API for accessing the disparate data types stored in those servers, as well as for accessing external data sources like file systems and WebDAV repositories. XQuery implementations from integration vendors like BEA, Ipedo, Actuate, and OpenLink are also on the market today. The good news is that many vendors are actively developing useful products and helping promote the use of XQuery. The bad news is that some of these vendors are using proprietary XQuery extensions and highly purposed implementations to deliver working products, with the unfortunate result that the XQuery services offered by these vendors are bound within the context of their platform-based solutions.

Other solutions coming to market, like DataDirect XQuery™, will offer XQuery and XQJ compliant data access technology as an embeddable, high performance component. Interestingly, the DataDirect Technologies’ XQuery implementation will expose as XML the relational data stored on any of the major database platforms. In other words, using relational data in an XQuery will not be dependent on the database vendor’s support of XML. And, DataDirect XQuery™ will provide hard-to-match performance benefits by pushing much of the distributed query and join operations to the underlying relational database platforms involved in the query. This fast and lightweight approach to data integration will be a natural fit for developing rich data-level SOA services.