Chapter 5: XML Operations withXQuery
Overview
XQuery, or XML Query, is a query language that operates on a data model for XML documents that is based on the W3C XML Infoset and supports W3C XML Namespaces and W3C XML Schema data types. The XQuery language operates on XML documents or databases viewed as XML documents, thereby allowing transparent access to both and further enabling seamless transactions on the Internet.From the requirements set out by the user community, the XQuery functionality should be able to perform queries on XML that are in the form of human-readable documents, data-oriented documents, mixed document-oriented and data-oriented, administrative data, streaming data, DOM objects, native repositories and web servers, and catalogs.This chapter will introduce the basics of XQuery, introduce the Oracle XQuery engine and describe how it interacts with the Oracle database, and present XQuery best practices.