Article:		XQuery Implementation
Subject:		Data integration was always part of the XQuery vision
Date:		2003-11-13 12:02:15
From:		Jonathan Robie
In talking about data integration for loosely coupled environments, this article says "XQuery will find its spot under the sun in a land little anticipated by its authors." Here is the Abstract from the XQuery spec: XML is a versatile markup language, capable of labeling the information content of diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. A query language that uses the structure of XML intelligently can express queries across all these kinds of data, whether physically stored in XML or viewed as XML via middleware. This specification describes a query language called XQuery, which is designed to be broadly applicable across many types of XML data sources. This abstract is closely related to the abstract used in one of the first presentations of Quilt, a predecessor of XQuery, in March, 2000: XML is an extremely versatile markup language, capable of labeling the information content of diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. A query language of similar versatility is needed to realize the potential of XML as a universal medium for data interchange. Most existing proposals for XML query languages are robust for particular types of data sources but weak for other types. In this paper, the authors combine features from several sources to propose a new query language called Quilt, which is designed to be broadly applicable across all types of XML data sources. This article is quite correct in saying that XQuery is useful for data integration in loosely coupled environments. That's actually by design. Jonathan

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• Data integration was always part of the XQuery vision
  2003-11-13 17:03:40 Ivelin Ivanov [Reply]
  
  My wording was poor in this case.

  
  I wanted to stress on the fact that XQuery for databases is advertised a lot, whereas Web Services integration with XQuery is not nearly as popular.

  
  There are several web services languages being developed under organizations such as OASIS (e.g. WSIL, WSFL, BizTalk), but non of them seem to attempt to leverage XQuery.

  
  Ivelin