[xquery-talk] [xml-dev] Re: JDBC in an XQuery world (?)

[Peter Coppens]

On 02 Oct 2011, at 20:42, John Cowan wrote:

> Liam R E Quin scripsit:
> 
>>> What if I have (or want) an XQuery database
>>> (or would you call that a XML database with an XQuery interface ...?) 
>> 
>> SQL/XML I think describes enough of a mapping, no?
> 
> I don't think so.  SQL/XML extends SQL to add XML as a new kind of primitive
> SQL data type, like strings, numbers, and dates.  What's needed here is a
> way to do ordinary SQL operations over an XDM-based database.

It does do a bit more as far as I understood it, e.g. it also introduce a "schredding" construct, XMLTABLE

Here is an example (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0708nicola/)

SELECT X.* 
FROM emp, 
XMLTABLE ('$d/dept/employee' passing doc as "d" 
   COLUMNS 
   empID 	INTEGER 	PATH '@id',
   firstname 	VARCHAR(20) 	PATH 'name/first',
   lastname 	VARCHAR(25) 	PATH 'name/last') AS X

In this case the source is still a table with some XML in some column but I guess making the step to some XML collection in some XML database is not that big.

Peter