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Debunking XQuery myths and misunderstandings

Promising technology makes it easier to build services that work with XML

Level: Intermediate

Frank Cohen (frank.cohen@rainingdata.com), Director, Solutions Engineering, Raining Data Corporation

06 May 2005

Updated 07 Jul 2005

XQuery shows much promise for software architects and developers because it greatly reduces the amount of code you need to write to build services that work with XML. You might think XQuery does everything and is well understood, but misconceptions and misunderstandings still exist in the software development community about XQuery. In this article, Frank Cohen details and clarifies many of the myths and misunderstandings that surround XQuery.

If you work with XML, Web services, or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), you will likely benefit from the emerging XML Query (XQuery) standard. XQuery is not even a formally accepted standard, yet dozens of implementations help software architects and developers every day. What began as a standard for querying XML documents now includes the next-generation standards for XML selection (XPath 2), XML serialization, full-text search, and functional XML data modeling. A project of this size is bound to have much myth and misunderstanding that needs to be debunked. Here are some of the more common myths and misunderstandings surrounding XQuery.

Table of Contents

• Misunderstanding - Database companies see XQuery as direct competition to their core businesses
• Myth - XQuery will replace XSLT
• Myth - XQuery will replace SQL
• Misunderstanding - To adopt XQuery, you must abandon procedural programming for object programming
• Myth - XQuery is more difficult to use than JDOM, JAXP, and other XML parsing APIs
• Myth - XQuery is difficult to learn to use
• Misunderstanding - XQuery is not product; XQuery is just a layer in a stack somewhere
• Misunderstanding - XQuery is not important in improving Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) performance and complexity
• Misunderstanding - XQuery does not have a significant role to play in data transformation
• Misunderstanding - XQuery offers nothing to On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and data warehousing applications
• Myth - XQuery will not scale to handle large datasets; XQuery will never be as fast as relational databases
• Misunderstanding - Aren't XPath and XQuery the same thing?
• Misunderstanding - XQuery lacks an update mechanism
• Myth - The XQuery specification will never achieve RFC status
• Myth - XQuery supports token-based text searches
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