Skip to Content
XQuery
book

XQuery

by Priscilla Walmsley
March 2007
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
21h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XQuery

Chapter 11. A Closer Look at Types

Chapter 2 briefly introduced the use of types in XQuery. This chapter delves deeper into the XQuery type system and its set of built-in types. It explains the automatic type conversions performed by the processors and describes the expressions that are relevant to types, namely type constructors, cast and castable expressions, and instance of expressions.

The XQuery Type System

XQuery is a strongly typed language, meaning that each function and operator is expecting its arguments or operands to be of a particular type. This means, for example, that you cannot perform arithmetic operations on strings, without explicitly telling the processor to treat your strings like numbers. This is similar to some common object-oriented programming languages, like Java and C#. It is in contrast to most scripting languages, like JavaScript, which will automatically coerce values to the appropriate type.

Advantages of a Strong Type System

There are several advantages to a strong type system. One of them is the early and reliable identification of errors in a query. Potential errors in the query can be determined before the query is even executed. For example, if you are trying to double a value that is a string (e.g., a product name), there is probably an error in the query. In addition, a type system allows for the identification of errors in the values of input data. This identification of errors can make queries easier to debug, and results in more reliable queries ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

XSLT

XSLT

Doug Tidwell
XPath and XPointer

XPath and XPointer

John Simpson
XQuery Kick Start

XQuery Kick Start

James McGovern, Per Bothner, Kurt Cagle, James Linn, Vaidyanathan Nagarajan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006349Errata