Chapter 1. XQuery: A Guided Tour

Jonathan Robie

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.

In addition, some systems offer XML views of non-XML data sources such as relational databases, allowing XML-based processing of data that is not physically represented as XML. An XML document can represent almost anything, and users of an XML query language expect it to perform useful queries on whatever they have stored in XML. Examples illustrating the variety of XML documents and queries that operate on them appear in [XQ-UC].

However complex the data stored in XML may be, the structure of XML itself is simple. An XML document is essentially an outline in which order and hierarchy are the two main structural units. XQuery is based on the structure of XML and leverages this structure to provide query capabilities for the same range of data that XML stores. To be more precise, XQuery is defined in terms of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model [XQ-DM], which represents the parsed structure of an XML document as an ordered, labeled tree in which nodes have identity and may be associated with simple or complex types . XQuery can be used to query XML data that has no schema at all, or that is governed by a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Schema or by a Document Type Definition (DTD). Note that the data model used by XQuery is quite different from the classical relational model, which has no hierarchy, treats order as insignificant, and does not support identity. XQuery is a functional language ”instead of executing commands as procedural languages do, every query is an expression to be evaluated, and expressions can be combined quite flexibly with other expressions to create new expressions.

This chapter gives a high-level introduction to the XQuery language by presenting a series of examples, each of which illustrates an important feature of the language and shows how it is used in practice. Some of the examples are drawn from [XQ-UC]. We cover most of the language features of XQuery, but also focus on teaching the idioms used to solve specific kinds of problems with XQuery. We start with a discussion of the structure of XML documents as input and output to queries and then present basic operations on XML ”locating nodes in XML structures using path expressions , constructing XML structures with element constructors , and combining and restructuring information from XML documents using FLWOR expressions , sorting, conditional expressions, and quantified expressions. After that, we explore operators and functions, discussing arithmetic operators, comparisons, some of the common functions in the XQuery function library, and how to write and call user -defined functions. Finally, we discuss how to import and use XML Schema types in queries.

Many users will learn best if they have access to a working implementation of XQuery. Several good implementations can be downloaded for free from the Internet; a list of these appears on the W3C XML Query Working Group home page, which is found at http://www.w3.org/xml/Query.html.

This chapter is based on the May 2003 Working Draft of the XQuery language. XQuery is still under development, and some aspects of the language discussed in this chapter may change.



XQuery from the Experts(c) A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language
Beginning ASP.NET Databases Using VB.NET
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 102

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