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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

XQuery Kick StartXQuery Kick Start

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

XQuery Kick StartXQuery Kick Start

Learn More Buy

Why Not SQL?

One of the first questions you can ask about XQuery is "Why not just create an updated version of SQL and use it with XML?" Beyond the vendor implementation issue we mentioned, one of the biggest problems that occurs comes from the infosets of SQL versus XML.

When you make a SQL query, you create from several tables a single virtual table (in simplest terms), which consists of the intersections, unions, and other filtered operations of the source tables. This is one of the reasons why being able to factor a problem domain into a minimal set of tables is so important: The more overlap that exists in tables, the more work must be done to eliminate spurious data sets.

Relational databases can be extraordinarily complex. Moreover, they are not good with "semi-structured" data (documents). Even a simple HTML document can very quickly overwhelm a relational database with its apparent complexity, and one of the characteristics of XML is the fact that a given element can have a range of possible subelements (or might even have an open definition in which the element can have anything as a subelement).

SQL mirrors the tabular mindset of good database design, and has been optimized for it. This means that it doesn't handle unpredictability and irregularity in data structure well.

As more data moves into an XML form, SQL's limitations become more pressing. As code becomes more complex, the advantages of a common XML-oriented data query language will become more obvious.

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