[xquery-talk] [Announce] XQilla version 1.1.0 released

John Snelson john.snelson at oracle.com
Tue Sep 4 14:03:11 PDT 2007


Andrew Welch wrote:
> On 9/4/07, John Snelson <john.snelson at oracle.com> wrote:
>>> XQuery [is | should be] much better for selecting nodes, so XSLT with
>>> embedded XQuery seems a natural combination for XML dbs that store
>>> document centric XML with a target output of (X)HTML.
>> I'm not sure I agree. XSLT 2.0 uses XPath 2.0, and there isn't a lot
>> that XQuery has that XPath 2.0 doesn't have. The only truly substantive
>> things are "order by" and node construction - but XSLT can already do
>> both of them.
> 
> The point I was trying to make was that XQuery + XML DB should be able
> to select nodes far faster than XSLT + REST API, so the ideal
> combination is XSLT + XQuery extension function.

Surely what you really want is an XSLT processor in the XML database? 
There's no reason why you need XQuery to access an XML database if it 
will let you send it XSLT directly, and return you the results.

> I was wondering though if XQuery is even needed - if there was an XSLT
> extension function that took three arguments:
> 
> xmldb($db-uri, $collection, $xpath)
> 
> and returned a sequence then that would do the job...

Right - that would be the other way to do it. If you want your XSLT to 
be executed by the database client, you can just make calls into the XML 
database from the XSLT. This approach would give less scope for the 
database to optimise the XSLT using it's indexes though.

John



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