XML Hacks

Execute an XQuery with Saxon

So you know how to write an XQuery? Great! But can you execute an XQuery? This hack shows you how.

When executing XQuery you have a wide range of options. Nearly every vendor—from the well-known old guard (IBM, Oracle, BEA, and Microsoft) to the plucky upstarts (Mark Logic, X-Hive/DB, and Qizx/open) to the open source projects led by individuals (Saxon and Qexo)—has expressed their support for XQuery and have XQuery implementations to offer. The implementations vary widely in purpose as well as in performance and scalability.

XQuery implementations tend to fall into one of three camps. First, there’s the streaming transformation model. In this fairly simple application, XQuery defines the mapping from one file format to another. XQuery as a language has certain optional features (such as reverse axes) not needed for implementations doing simple streaming transformations where you can forget nodes right after you read them. In this use XQuery is similar to XSLT, but XQuery adds data typing and static type-analysis. Letting you statically verify your XQuery code will always generate a properly constructed document conformant to a specific schema. A good example of the streaming engine is BEA’s WebLogic Integration product (http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/content/products/integrate).

Second, XQuery can be used as a meta query language executing against one or more relational databases. In this scenario, XQuery accesses the relational ...