XML Connections

Thursday, October 30, 2008

XQuery for the SQL programmer – Why XQuery?

Over the last month, wearing our SQL-glasses we mastered the basics of XQuery. But wait... what we’ve learned up to now in the XQuery for the SQL programmer series is about “do in XQuery what you can do in SQL”. Doesn’t sound like a compelling reason to use XQuery

To be clear, I’m not advocating to replace SQL with XQuery. For a lot of good reasons SQL is there today, and it will be there tomorrow. Admitting, that’s also a good thing for DataDirect, as a fair amount of our business is based on ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET.

Why do I want to use XQuery against relational databases? Minollo answered the question before. It’s all about the data integration promise offered by products like DataDirect’s Data Integration Suite.

If you frequent xml-connection.com you know about the use cases

Are you suffering data integration?

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posted by marc at 8:53 AM

2 Comments:

  • Hello!

    Your blog is very interesting and provides well prepared in-depth information about XQuery.

    I have few questions:

    I would like to use XQJ in a project. Would you advice to use the reference implementation (XQJ-EA-RI-1.0), or is it risky because XQJ might change in the future?

    And a question about your opinion, if you allow: Do you think, XML technology will evolve in such a way, that it could replace all existing database-related technologies?

    Thank you!

    By Blogger Ivan Ivanovich Ivanoff, At November 1, 2008 10:46 AM  

  • Hi Ivan,

    I would advice to go for XQJ, but would not use the reference implementation (RI). Note that the primary focus of the RI is the XQJ API itself, and not the XQuery engine itself. I'm sure you agree the stability, performance and scalability of the XQuery engine is key.

    If you want to do serious XQuery development I would use one of the available alternatives supporting XQJ. Working for DataDirect, I would of course advise to have a look at DataDirect XQuery... In addition, which XQuery engine to use will also be influenced by the data sources you're targeting.

    On your second question. As I wrote in this post, RDBMSs are out there today and I'm confident a fair amount of the industry will continue running on RDBMS technology in the future. I would say that both will co-exist.

    Marc

    By Blogger marc, At November 20, 2008 8:50 AM  

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