[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] ANN: Oracle XQuery Prototype & Production SQLX+XMLType Support
Two announcements of interest to folks working with XML and databases... (1) In March 2002, Oracle posted an XQuery prototype at: http://otn.oracle.com/sample_code/tech/xml/xmldb/content.html with support focusing on the "R" (Relational Data) and the "XMP" (Experiences and Exemplars) XQuery use cases, and featuring an experimental JDBC-style Java API for XQuery as well as a sql() function for using XQuery over SQL query results. Our goal is ultimately to provide both a SQL-flavored and an XQuery-based query *syntax* for XML content in Oracle leveraging the same underlying database engine via appropriate query rewriting. That common underlying engine is now production. See (#2). (2) This week -- over two years in the making -- Oracle announced the release of Oracle9i Release 2, with major new native database support for XML, and made the software available for download for eight different platforms. Key new features include: -> Single database engine supporting all existing datatypes (relational, SQL99 objects, data warehousing, geospatial, time-series, multimedia, etc.) integrated with a *new* native XMLType...all sharing a common SQL query language (extended for XML), common maintenance, transactions, backup/recovery, etc. -> Support for forthcoming ISO SQLX standard extensions to SQL for constructing XML in SQL including the operators XMLElement(), XMLAttributes(), XMLForest(), XMLAgg(), and XMLConcat() -> Full W3C XML Schema 1.0, XPath 1.0, XSLT 1.0, and DOM Core support for native XMLType datatype implemented deep inside the engine and exposed to SQL, PL/SQL and Java API's. Users can augment built-in processing of XML documents with stored procedures, functions, and triggers as for any other types and tables. -> Automatic Object/Relational Storage for XML documents based on XML Schema, with optional fine-tuning of the mapping via Schema Annotations (already supported in XML Spy 4.3 tool). Includes optional support for full DOM fidelity and mixed content storage. -> SQL extensions for XPath-based extract(), extractValue(), existsNode(), and updateXML() operators for manipulating documents, including the ability to rewrite a subset of XPath expressions to use underlying object/relational indices and full-text indices for maximum performance. -> Plus a lot more. A more complete overview of what's new for XML functionality is at: http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle9i/doc_library/release2/appdev.920/a96620/whatsnew.htm Full documentation is online and searchable in HTML and PDF formats at: http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle9i/doc_library/release2/index.htm Technical overviews and whitepapers are available at: http://otn.oracle.com/tech/xml/xmldb/content.html You can download a developer's licensed version for experimentation on any/all of the following eight platforms: (*) WindowsNT/2000/XP (*) Sun SPARC Solaris (32-bit) (*) Sun SPARC Solaris (64-bit) (*) Linux (*) AIX (64-bit) (*) AIX5L (*) HP-UX (*) Compaq Tru64 At http://www.oracle.com/start/dbrev2/intro.htm Any technical questions can be posted in our "XML Discussion Forum" at http://www.oracle.com/forums It's been hard not being able to talk about all of this new support for more than two years. The cat is finally out of the bag! :-) Enjoy. __________________________________________________________ Steve Muench - Developer, Product Mgr, Evangelist, Author Simplify J2EE and EJB Development with BC4J http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev/htdocs/j2ee_bc4j.html Building Oracle XML Apps, www.oreilly.com/catalog/orxmlapp
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