[xquery-talk] Collections - family relationships

[Michael Kay]

On 6 Jan 2014, at 13:11, Michael Sokolov <msokolov at safaribooksonline.com> wrote:

> On 1/6/2014 7:50 AM, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
>> 
>> The price the specification as is makes you pay for using the collection arrangement is to lose the semantic relationship. Should it? Thats the real question that motivated my posing the use case.
> It seems useful to me to have one set of relationships that work within-document and another (unspecified, as yet) that work among documents.  Without this, what is the purpose of having data apportioned into documents at all?
> 
> -Mike

I would say it is actually a rather unfortunate feature of the XML model that the partitioning of data into documents (and collections) is quite so visible at the query level, since this partitioning is often a "physical design" choice rather than something that flows naturally from the conceptual data model. It would be nice to have a model that hid this distinction, e.g. by making the entire database (or the entire web) appear to the query as a single document. But that's not the way life is.

Michael Kay
Saxonica