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XQuery Maturity

XQuery has achieved significant mindshare in the software press and at conferences, but many people have been reluctant to adopt before the specification became mature and serious implementations were available. XQuery has now reached that point.

W3C Proposed Recommendation

W3C XQuery 1.0 is now a W3C Proposed Recommendation. After 8 years of development, it has now passed many levels of technical review and is being sent to the W3C Advisory Committee for final endorsement. The Proposed Recommendation phase will last until at least 31 December 2006.

We expect XQuery to become a W3C Recommendation shortly thereafter, and do not anticipate further technical changes to the current specification.

The Proposed Recommendation specifications can be found at http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/#specs.

DataDirect XQuery 2.0

DataDirect XQuery 2.0 has been tested against the XQuery Test Suite, and is 99% compatible. Users can be confident that DataDirect XQuery implements the language defined by the standard.

DataDirect XQuery 2.0 is a second-generation XQuery engine, building on the technology of DataDirect XQuery 1.0 and our customer experience. This release includes significant performance and scalability enhancements, for both relational and XML queries. XML documents of multiple Gigabytes can now be queried. It also supports XML Data Converters, which allow non-XML formats to be converted to XML on the fly. Converters for thousands of EDI formats are available, as well as comma delimited, tab delimited, RTF, mbox, and many other formats. In addition, custom converters can be created using Stylus Studio.

DataDirect XQuery also adds support for new releases of several databases, including Oracle 10gR2, Sybase 15, and MS SQL Server 2005.