XQuery - Features

Features

XQuery provides the means to extract and manipulate data from XML documents or any data source that can be viewed as XML, such as relational databases or office documents.

XQuery uses XPath expression syntax to address specific parts of an XML document. It supplements this with a SQL-like "FLWOR expression" for performing joins. A FLWOR expression is constructed from the five clauses after which it is named: FOR, LET, WHERE, ORDER BY, RETURN.

The language also provides syntax allowing new XML documents to be constructed. Where the element and attribute names are known in advance, an XML-like syntax can be used; in other cases, expressions referred to as dynamic node constructors are available. All these constructs are defined as expressions within the language, and can be arbitrarily nested.

The language is based on the XQuery and XPath Data Model (XDM) which uses a tree-structured model of the information content of an XML document, containing seven kinds of nodes: document nodes, elements, attributes, text nodes, comments, processing instructions, and namespaces.

XDM also models all values as sequences (a singleton value is considered to be a sequence of length one). The items in a sequence can either be XML nodes or atomic values. Atomic values may be integers, strings, booleans, and so on: the full list of types is based on the primitive types defined in XML Schema.

XQuery 1.0 does not include features for updating XML documents or databases; it also lacks full text search capability. These features are both under active development for a subsequent version of the language. However, the new standards such as XQuery Update Facility 1.0 supports update feature and XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0 support full text search in XML documents.

XQuery is a programming language that can express arbitrary XML to XML data transformations with the following features:

  1. Logical/physical data independence
  2. Declarative
  3. High level
  4. Side-effect free
  5. Strongly typed

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