size of XQuery developer community

[Ken North]

Ron Bourret wrote:
>> What's the single killer app for SQL?

Ad hoc queries.

For the most part, the DBMS platforms that preceded the arrival of SQL, the hierarchical and CODASYL models, implemented queries with traversal logic in application programs. There were exceptions, including IBM GIS and TRW GIM, that actually used English-like commands for searching, deleting, inserting and updating.

But IMS and CODASYL were the defacto and de jure standard and writing a program using a known schema and sub-schema was how you implemented a query.