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RE: Comparing XSL and XQuery

• To: "'Ram Menon'" <menon_dev@h...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Comparing XSL and XQuery
• From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 17:12:03 -0000
• In-reply-to: <BAY15-F28cAA4Ei4vd9000746f9@h...>
• Thread-index: AcQPJzAy8P++XzzRRNGPfUXiHfIdrQAPnUog

XSLT doesn't "compare itself" with XQuery or anything else, but people may
compare the two languages: I did so, for example, in my chapter of "XQuery
from the Experts" published by Addison-Wesley.

In terms of functionality, XQuery 1.0 is essentially XSLT 1.0 without the
template rules. Comparing XQuery 1.0 with XSLT 2.0, XSLT has many additional
features in areas such as regular expression handling, grouping, date
formatting, number formatting, and so on.

In terms of usability, some people find the XML-based syntax of XSLT 1.0
useful and others find it verbose. (And some find it both...)

In terms of performance, the restricted functionality of XQuery relative to
XSLT undoubtedly makes it easier to optimize queries that are intended to
extract small quantities of data from large persistent XML databases. If you
try to use XQuery in XSLT's area of application, namely transformation of
individual in-memory XML documents, then there is no intrinsic reason to
believe that either language will perform better than the other. With
perhaps one exception: XSLT allows you to specify keys, which are in
invaluable aid to speeding up a transformation "by hand"; XQuery has no
equivalent, so it relies much more heavily on the optimizer.

At present on the xsl-list there is a thread discussing an XSLT stylesheet
that demonstrates dramatic differences between one XSLT processor and
another (two orders of magnitude), depending on which optimizations are
applied. It's not going to be easy to identify which performance differences
are due to differences between implementations, and which are attributable
to differences in the two languages.

Michael Kay

# -----Original Message-----
# From: Ram Menon [mailto:menon_dev@h...] 
# Sent: 21 March 2004 09:30
# To: xml-dev@l...
# Subject:  Comparing XSL and XQuery
# 
# I needed to know how XSLT compares itself against XQuery in 
# terms of features, semantics, performance etc...
# Can anybody please point me some information on this.
# 
# - Ram
# 
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