>Home>Learn XQuery>White Papers>Why XQuery>History Print

XQuery: Its History

XQuery originally evolved from another XML query language named Quilt. Back in 1998, many assumed that different information would be exchanged or stored as XML, and that this would involve massive amounts of data.

A query language that was based purely on the structure of XML could be used for anything that XML could represent, and the data did not need to be physically represented as XML, as long as data had an XML representation.

For example, an XML query could think of relational data as XML data, and middleware could translate the query to SQL, turning results into XML for the XML query. Since there was a universal representation for data, XML, XQuery was designed to be the universal query language for this data.

Unlike extensions to the SQL language that give some provision to work with XML, XQuery is designed as a separate language optimized to work with XML data.