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Misunderstanding: Database companies see XQuery as direct competition to their core businesses

Database companies see XQuery as an opportunity to augment their core solutions.

To software architects and developers, XQuery delivers increased productivity and agility. It makes sense that tool vendors (see Resources) are eager to get behind XQuery.

To a developer, XQuery looks a lot like SQL, so it's natural for comparisons to be made. Additionally, more and more data is being marked-up using XML; this puts pressure on database companies to add XML storage, persistence, and query capabilities to their products. XQuery has so much developer momentum behind it that IBM and Oracle put their rivalries on the back burner to extend their core database products to offer XQuery capabilities.

Database companies also see an opportunity to be the first -- and eventually market-dominating -- supplier of a database that takes full advantage of the XML format. Data stored in relational databases today is normalized around rows and fields. In the XML world, each row contains an unlimited number of fields and each field is part of a parent/child hierarchy. The database vendor that delivers fast performance and XQuery flexibility first will win a huge new market.

As evidence of this opportunity, XQuery has united IBM and Oracle -- otherwise fierce competitors -- to jointly propose JSR 225 (see Resources), the XQuery API for Java (XQJ). And on the .NET side, Microsoft and IBM have teamed to submit an XQuery test suite to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Next: "XQuery will replace XSLT"

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