Navigation in XQuery
3.1 Introduction
Once you've constructed or loaded XML in a query, you need a way to navigate over that hierarchical data. In many ways, construction and navigation are the primary operations in any XML query language. XQuery provides a litany of navigation expressions, and this chapter explores them all. Readers who are already familiar with XPath 1.0 may safely skim this chapter. XQuery has some differences from XPath 1.0, but they are minor.
Navigation involves starting from one part of an XML data model and moving to another part of the data model. Navigation can involve local steps, for example, moving from a node to one of its neighbors, or global steps, such as moving from a node to a completely different part of the data model, or even another document.
If you're familiar with relational databases, it may help to reflect that navigating is to XML nodes what cursoring is to relational rowsets. Like using regular expressions to parse strings, using navigation in a query is generally more efficient in space and time than manually traversing an XML structure.