Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context

XML has become the lingua franca for representing business data, for exchanging information between business partners and applications, and for adding structure– and sometimes meaning—to text-based documents. XML offers some special challenges and opportunities in the area of search: querying XML can produce very precise, fine-grained results, if you know how to express and execute those queries.

For software developers and systems architects: this book teaches the most useful approaches to querying XML documents and repositories. This book will also help managers and project leaders grasp how “querying XML” fits into the larger context of querying and XML. Querying XML provides a comprehensive background from fundamental concepts (What is XML?) to data models (the Infoset, PSVI, XQuery Data Model), to APIs (querying XML from SQL or Java) and more.

* Presents the concepts clearly, and demonstrates them with illustrations and examples; offers a thorough mastery of the subject area in a single book.
* Provides comprehensive coverage of XML query languages, and the concepts needed to understand them completely (such as the XQuery Data Model).
* Shows how to query XML documents and data using: XPath (the XML Path Language); XQuery, soon to be the new W3C Recommendation for querying XML; XQuery’s companion XQueryX; and SQL, featuring the SQL/XML extensions.
* Includes an extensive set of XQuery, XPath, SQL, Java, and other examples, with links to downloadable code and data samples.

Jim Melton of Oracle Corporation is editor of all parts of ISO/IEC 9075 (SQL) and has been active in SQL standardization for two decades. More recently, he has been active in the W3C's XML Query Working Group that defined XQuery, is co-Chair of that WG, and co-edited two of the XQuery specifications. Stephen Buxton is Director of Product Management at Mark Logic Corporation, and a member of the W3C XQuery Working Group and Full-Text Task Force. Until recently, Stephen was Director of Product Management for Text and XML at Oracle Corporation.

In a remarkably short period, XML has become the most important language for marking up documents for the Web as well as industry in general--and XML is rapidly becoming the lingua franca for marking up traditional business data, for exchanging information between business partners and application programs, and for expressing a host of concepts that improve the usability of computer systems. However good a tool it is, XML introduces tradeoffs and complications--and among the difficulties are ones posed by locating and retrieving information stored in documents marked up using XML.

This book teaches the most useful approaches to querying XML documents and repositories of such documents--to both identify documents and then to extract information from them. In addition, it offers perspective on some other technologies that are closely related as well as valuable insights in context about locating and retrieving XML documents. Presents the concepts clearly, and demonstrates them with illustrations and examples throughout; allows the software engineer a way to master this topic thoroughly in a single book.