[xquery-talk] Article: "Five Practical XQuery Applications"

[Jeni Tennison]

Hi Mike,

>> I'll throw out the use cases I'm looking at - using web services
>> against heterogeneous data sources. We have a number of data
>> sources - RDBMSs, Excel docs, and proprietary formatted files -
>> which we want to allow to be exposed via web services, i.e.,
>> provide services which queries the data sources and returns large
>> XML docs. Sometimes, these queries are for reporting purposes.
>
> Indeed, the ability to query multiple, disparate sources in one pass
> seems to be a distinct advantage to using XQuery over XSLT.

I'm not sure what feature of XQuery you're referring to? XSLT 2.0
processors can have multiple nodes supplied as the input sequence
(accessible via the input() function). XSLT 2.0 supports the
collection() function, and XSLT 1.0 has always had the document()
function for accessing multiple sources of information within a single
transformation.

XSLT 2.0 also introduces the unparsed-text() function for accessing
information that isn't available in an XML format without writing a
SAX filter or something equivalent. XQuery doesn't support this
function as far as I know.

So I don't think there's any real difference at this level?

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/