I posted the T-SQL XQuery demo. I will add the .Net Framework Xquery demo later. Also, Kent has written up a synopsis of the presentation. This time, I have no further comments :-). Thanks to all who showed up for the last presentation on a Friday afternoon. And congrats to the two winners of the XQuery books. There were lots of questions and though competition.

At Microsoft TechEd 2004 in San Diego, Microsoft provided further details on its upcoming database release now known as SQL Server 2005 (formerly code-named “Yukon”). The software will natively support Web services, XML and encryption.

Though XQuery is still a young language, it is important to look at the design choices of XQuery and find out the major influences on that design.

When you combine XML with URLs, great things happen. These two factors together make the endpoints of a transaction transparent to the kind of technologies that are on the other ends. However, this transparency can break down in the presence of databases. XQuery was proposed as a solution to this conundrum. Kurt Cagle looks at the structure and language of XQuery.

This chapter explores how XQuery provides a litany of navigation expressions. It is designed to be a language in which queries are concise and easily understood. It is also flexible enough to query a broad spectrum of XML information sources, including both databases and documents.

One of the most controversial, and in my opinion most often misunderstood aspect of XQuery 1.0/XPath 2.0 is their relationship to types. Many people seem to understand that the type system is based on the W3C XML Schema language (which is true) and then conclude that it is complex (which is only partially true). Also, too many people mix up the notions of weak, strong, static, and dynamic typing. In this and some following posts, I would like to bring some order into the confusion and explain how the type system in XQuery and XPath 2.0 works. First we will introduce a whole bunch of terms and talk about the general concepts. In subsequent posts I will look at the actual XQuery types and some examples and scenarios for weak, strong, static, and dynamic typing.

When you combine XML, which is essentially an open data format independent of any specific data-formatting language, with a universal addressing mechanism such as URLs, great things happen. These two factors together make the endpoints of a transaction transparent to the kind of technologies that are on the other ends.

Despite disharmony among database vendors over web services workflow (or choreography), they do agree on XQuery, the proposed standard for querying XML data and documents.

Anyone who has ever done a search query on the Internet is familiar with the phenomenon in which a single query pulls up more than a million possible search matches. This has to do with the fact that information is ultimately not linear, but rather is linked and interrelated in ways that can't be quantified easily through text searches.

For all the recent disharmony among database providers over the topic of web services workflow (or choreography), there are also signs of database unity on other key fronts. Case in point: The W3C this week should begin reviewing a test suite for XQuery, the web services standard for querying XML data and documents.

In Part 1 we examined what XQuery is and saw some example XQuery syntax. In particular, we examined the FLWR expression. In this final part we'll look at Microsoft's .NET XQuery engine, and how to start using XQuery in ASP.NET today.

XQuery borrows path expressions from XPath. XQuery can be viewed as a generalization of XPath. Except for some obscure forms (mostly unusual "axis specifiers"), all XPath expressions are also XQuery expressions. For this reason the XPath specification is also being revised by the XQuery committee, with the plan that XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 will be released about the same time.

XQuery is often described as a query language for processing XML databases. But it's also a very nice language for generating XML and HTML, including web pages. In this article we will look at XQuery from this angle.

With Tamino 4.1, support for the XQuery language was introduced. XQuery allows one to only update parts of a XML document. In previous versions the same functionality was available by using the IIS filter NodeLevelUpdate.dll (IIS = MS Internet Information Server), at least on the Windows platform.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is an extremely versatile data format that has been used to represent many different kinds of data, including web pages, web messages, books, business and accounting data, XML representations of relational database tables, programming interfaces, objects, financial transactions, chess games, vector graphics, multimedia presentations, credit applications, system logs, and textual variants in ancient Greek manuscripts.

W3C has published a new working draft document which describes constructors, operators, and functions that are used in XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0. The draft "was produced through the efforts of a joint task force of the W3C XML Query Working Group and the W3C XML Schema Working Group and a second joint task force of the W3C XML Query Working Group and the W3C XSL Working Group.

Finding specific information contained in an XML document can be a challenge. However, XQuery can save you valuable time when searching XML documents. Review the essentials of this W3C specification in this introduction.

The following functions are available only in Tamino XQuery 4. They are bound to the namespace http://namespaces.softwareag.com/tamino/TaminoFunction that is usually prefixed by tf.

A communiqué from Irsan Widarto (X-Hive Corporation) announces the release of a Technology Preview for X-Hive/DB 3.0. The new release adds support for XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0, DOM Level 3 Load and Save, and DOM Level 3 Abstract Schemas. X-Hive/DB also supports XML 1.0 with Namespaces, DOM Level 2, XPath, XPointer, XLink, XSL-T, XSL-FO, and XUpdate. Using native XML database technology, X-Hive/DB stores XML documents in parsed form, eliminating translations between XML document structure and the database schema.

Tamino XQuery is an implementation of the upcoming W3C standard XQuery, and defines a genuine XML query language with firm ground in existing XML standards. XQuery is a functional, strongly typed language that satisfies the requirements of a database query language in the context of native XML databases much better than a path language such as XPath 1.0. In this document we will introduce the core concepts of XQuery as they are realised in Tamino XQuery.