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Re: What niche is XQuery targeting?

• To: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
• Subject: Re: What niche is XQuery targeting?
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 16:47:45 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <e3a5cb2c04120212103877b25@m...>
• References: <41AF5463.6030004@e...> <20041202183550.SFKI3407.aamta07-winn.mailhost.ntl.com@Turtle> <e3a5cb2c04120212103877b25@m...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040722i

On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 03:10:06PM -0500, Michael Champion wrote:
[...]
> So, I guess one could say that XQuery is at least implicitly targeting
> the situations where you have multiple collections of XML or
> XMLizeable information that need to be related, and allows you to
> relate them dynamically by value rather than by a priori links.

Yes.  Doing a join between data in multiple databases, especially
where the databases are of very different types, used to require
proprietary middleware.

I wrote a keyword search for my Web site that queries over a relational
database, a bunch of RDF, a (filebased) geographical database and a
bunch of XML documents.  It took about ten minutes to get something
working, and about an hour or two to get something good enough for
production use.

Strictly speaking it could also have been done in XSLT, but there's a
danger that the XSLT implementation would have had to examine my
entire database (e.g. if I used apply-templates) and a lower chance
that it would have made use of an index... in other words, even
if the languages are very similar in coverage, the focus of
implementations is likely to be very different.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: Robert Koberg <rob@k...>

• References:
  • Re: What niche is XQuery targeting?
    • From: Burak Emir <Burak.Emir@e...>
  • RE: What niche is XQuery targeting?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
  • Re: What niche is XQuery targeting?
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>

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