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The widespread adoption of XML has profoundly altered the way that information is exchanged within and between enterprises. XML, an extensible, text-based markup language, describes data in a way that is both hardware- and software-independent. As such, it has become a standard of choice for a growing number of Web services and Service Oriented Architectures. With a vast amount of data being published in XML format by multiple sources, the need has arisen for an easy and efficient means of extracting and manipulating this information. XQuery has emerged as an ideal way to aggregate data from Web services, relational databases, and other applications that employ XML.
This XQuery tutorial explains XQuery's use as a report-generation technology, for aggregating data from multiple sources. The tutorial uses real-world data from a stock-quote Web service, and combining that information with historical company data stored in a relational database and presented as XML. In this tutorial, the historical data is being enhanced with live data about the current stock price, which is being retrieved via a Web-service call. Once the data is aggregated, it can be presented in any number of formats.
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