Much Ado About Something – XQuery and Microsoft Office 2007

Earlier this year DataDirect attended their second QCON Conference and exhibition in London. QCON is an eclectic mix of technologies, vendors and speakers. The conference runs over three day with speaking slots starting 9am and going on until 6:45pm. There are six track for the three days so plenty to interest any development and technology!

DataDirect presented around the title “Data - XML AND XQuery a language that can combine and transform data.”  As XML and XQuery have grown in use we have seen a growing interest in tools around the querying and manipulation of XML.

During our session we showed how DataDirect's implementation of XQuery can not only manipulate and process XML data but can also read and write data to RDBMS and also consume data for DataDirect XML Converter that can convert bi-directionally numerous EDI File formats, flat file and other non XML data files.

At the end of the session we demonstrated how XQuery can Query and manipulate Microsoft Office 2007 Word files as they are now XML based. Querying and formatting the Shakespeare play “Much Ado About Nothing” from the whole works of Shakespeare took less than 2 seconds!

You can find the presentation at the following link. http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/file?path=/qcon-london-2009/slides/JohndeLonga_DataXMLAndXQueryALanguageThatCanCombineAndTransformData.pdf

Having spoken to many delegates during the three days I believe those that attended and shared their time between the presentation tracks and the various vendor stands will have gathered considerable amount of up to date knowledge in both development techniques and way of accessing their data where ever it may reside. I look forward to next year’s event.