XQuery for the SQL programmer – Why XQuery?

Over the last month, wearing our SQL-glasses we mastered the basics of XQuery. But wait... what we’ve learned up to now in the XQuery for the SQL programmer series is about “do in XQuery what you can do in SQL”. Doesn’t sound like a compelling reason to use XQuery

To be clear, I’m not advocating to replace SQL with XQuery. For a lot of good reasons SQL is there today, and it will be there tomorrow. Admitting, that’s also a good thing for DataDirect, as a fair amount of our business is based on ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET.

Why do I want to use XQuery against relational databases? Minollo answered the question before. It’s all about the data integration promise offered by products like DataDirect’s Data Integration Suite.

If you frequent xml-connection.com, you know about the use cases

• Publishing relational data as XML
• Shredding XML into an RDBMS
• Aggregating your LDAP repository with relational data
• Developing WebServices
• Interfacing through EDI messages
• Handling proprietary formats
• Bulk loading of XML
• Joining XML with your relational database
• Querying WebServices
• Reading office documents to update your database
• Producing EDI messages

 

Are you suffering data integration?