Chapter 10

Introduction to XQuery 1.0

10.1 Introduction

In Chapter 9, “XPath 1.0 and XPath 2.0,” we presented one language for querying XML documents, XPath. In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to a much more powerful language for querying XML called XQuery.

We start with a brief history of the language. We think it’s useful to know the background of a language’s development, because it gives some insight into how and why things are as they are, but feel free to skip this section if it doesn’t interest you.

Next, we look at the specs that laid the foundation for the design of the language – the Requirements and the Use Cases. These two specs tell us what the language is for (what problems the language is meant to solve) and give us some examples ...

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