[xquery-talk] [xml-dev] Re: using FLWOR expressions (aka SQL..) directly in Python

daniela florescu dflorescu at me.com
Fri Oct 21 10:59:03 PDT 2016


Ihe,

Based on my experience, lots of data processing people use Python those days, yet they are not helped
much by the available tools in their ecosystem.

PythonQL is to Python what LinQ was to C#, that’s all.

A simple and more natural way to run queries directly integrated in your normal programming and
a replacement to the horrible scripts that most people need to write today for data manipulation.

Now, is this “XQuery" !? Nope. 

The FLWOR expressions of XQuery have nothing to do with XML, neither syntactically, nor semantically.

They are just a generalized, cleaner and more powerful form of data comprehension , out of which SQL’s SELECT-FROM-WHERE
is an example, but not the only one. (Python has it’s now form of comprehension for example). 

In fact in PhytonQL we tried to avoid what we perceived as serious problems with the adoption of XQuery.

For example we made the following syntactic choices (good or bad, we’ll see…):

1. FOR and FROM are synonyms. Choose whatever you like the best…..
2. IF and WHERE are synonyms. Again, choose whatever you like the best…..
3. We avoided the (over)loaded RETURN keyword of XQuery and called it SELECT like in SQL.
4. We put the SELECT clause first, like in SQL.

But other then this, it’s just 100% FLWOr expression, with windowing, grouping, etc.

Does this make sense ?

Best regards
Dana







> On Oct 21, 2016, at 10:46 AM, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is the big thing here integration with the Python ecosystem? 
> Otherwise what is this offering to people who are not XQueryphobic.
> 
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 1:13 PM, daniela florescu <dflorescu at me.com <mailto:dflorescu at me.com>> wrote:
> For all exasperated data scientists writing mind bending, complicated Python scrips to process their data: the power of complex, 
> yet familiar, compact and optimizable SQL queries directly in Python, running on structured as well as unstructured data (XML, JSON).
> 
> http://www.pythonql.org <http://www.pythonql.org/>
> 
> Well, actually it’s not SQL per se. It’s the better, cleaner and more powerful version of SELECT-FROM-WHERE,…. its the
> power of XQuery’s FLWOR expressions, directly usable as an expression in Python — together with any other expected goodies,
> complex path expressions, etc.
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> Best regards
> Dana
> 
> 
> 
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