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On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 11:34:39 -0500, Tony Lavinio <xml1@l...> wrote: > Obviously, XQuery vendor adoption is huge, but what about > developer adoption? Are people actually using XQuery? > > DataDirect conducted a survey of 550 software professionals and > found that 52% of those surveyed were already using XQuery, and > that another 33% said that they plan to use XQuery in the next > 12 months -- Incredible considering the official standard from > the W3C is still several months from final completion. The free > study also investigates who is using XQuery, and why. You can > download the results from here: > http://www.datadirect.com/xquerystudy/ The whole point of a survey reporting percentages and margins of error is to generalize about some larger population of people. What is the population from which the sample was drawn? If it is a representative sample of the overall population of software professionals, these results are indeed incredible ... perhaps in the literal sense of the term :-). If it is 550 people selected from the overall population of XML developers, the results would still be quite intriguing; I would be very surprised to find this much interest in XQuery given the general lack of XQuery enthusiasts on this list. But the list isn't exactly a representative sample of XML developers. If this is 550 people selected from the overall population of people who build XML-centric applications on top of a DBMS, the numbers sound about right to me. That would confirm my understanding that XQuery is the obvious choice for an XML DB query language and that all other contenders have dropped off the radar. Likewise, since XQuery implementations are starting to mature, this survey could be valuable evidence that a "meme" is starting to proliferate of using XQuery on top of a database to handle large volumes of XML rather than streaming it thru SAX or whatever. But if it is 550 people who happened to be your customers or were selected from some group known to have a high percentage of XQuery users, the results are more or less meaningless to the rest of us. Even M. David Peterson probably admits that there are a few hundred XQuery users in the world :-) The question is whether you just found them and gave them your survey, or if those 550 are representative of a much larger and more interesting population. So, in statistical terms, who are these developers who are rapidly adopting XQuery? p.s. The most intriguing bit of the survey results for me was the aside "DataDirect's own informal tests, which have shown that for various common use cases involving querying and transforming XML data sources, an XQuery expression can accomplish the desired result using just 1/5th of the code of acomparable XSLT stylesheet solution; and just 1/20th of the coderequired by a lower-level DOM programming approach." I bet a lot of us would like to see those common use cases and judge for ourselves whether [D|X|JD]OM+XPath, XSLT, or XQuery differ dramatically in their effectiveness for addressing them. My personal guess is that in general XPath does the heavy lifting in all three approaches and whether one approach is more efficient to write than another depends largely on the problem to be solved (maybe XQuery is easier for schema-valid XML data, XSLT for deeply recursive documents, an API for situations where a lot of ad hoc function calls, calculations, and transformations are needed). If you can refute that, I would be VERY interested.
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