[xquery-talk] Partitioning data with XQuery

[Michael Kay]

> 1. Take the person that originally design the input format 
> and publicly
> humiliate him or her. This is really bad design.

This is the "If I were you I wouldn't start from here" response.

Unfortunately we all sometimes have such tasks to perform. The worst one I
ever tackled was restructuring the XML produced by Microsoft Excel, but all
my attempts to publicly humiliate its designers have failed.

In fact, it's because people generate XML from sources where there is little
knowledge of the underlying data structure that they need to run
transformations to superimpose that structure. This is why grouping problems
feature so high on the list of interesting XSLT challenges, and will no
doubt feature equally highly for XQuery.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/