size of XQuery developer community

[Ken North]

Another way to slice the data is to look at adoption in specific industries:

Healthcare's XML Heartbeat
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/dmmag/DMMag_2009_Issue2/Industry/index.html

>From there, you can look at the platforms being used by that industry and whether they integrate XML and XQuery (e.g., Oracle 11g, IBM DB2, SQL Server). 

Not every user of one of those platforms is also an XQuery user, in part because integrated support for XQuery is more recent than languages such as C# and Java. But the native XML products and XML-enabled products provide some indication of the potential size of the community.

You can use an XQuery extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer to query files but web developers are only one slice of the community.

What is most likely to drive XQuery growth is increasing the number of application frameworks and visual developer suites, particularly dual mode tools, that generate XQuery. That's what dramatically increased adoption of the SQL client-server model - cheap integrated developer environments with SQL support. 

When you see heavy XQuery adoption by the PaaS vendors, you'll know those trend lines will be start looking different.