Xquery might have some things right
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 21:10:57 -0600
Message-ID: <c23ic9$usb$1_at_news.netins.net>
My current interests related to software application development and the tools employed for such are aimed in two primary directions -- databases and distributed computing. XML plays in both of these categories. In discussions related to both topics, there is a lot of lashing out against XML as being a stupid approach to whatever it is it might be approaching. Marshall answered a recent post by indicating he is not a fan of XML, for example. I, too, have been know to state opinions about how it is not terribly important that persisted objects of any type (thought I'd toss in some OO terminology just to mess with a few of you) be human-readable in their persistent state. I don't have to be able to look directly at a CD and hear the music either.
BUT, XML does have some things going for it, not the least of which is that it is our best bet yet for freeing ourselves of SQL -- a language with which I have a love-hate relationship, but which is ready for retirement, in my opinion. XQuery, the emerging standard where Microsoft seems to be putting their money, is something I have referred to as a "dog-ugly language" (although many dogs are cute) but it has some significant advances over SQL. I decided it was time to learn the language a bit more and foudn that it does employ a 2 valued logic (THANK GOODNESS!) as well as the obviously superior approach to nested data (multivalues) compared to the RDBMS's I have seen.
Additionally, along with the data modeling related to a UI, one of the big areas ripe for database theorists to join web folks is data modeling as it relates to data searching. We think of search engines for semi-structured data (such as text documents on the web), but our applications have often been so restrictive in making users get their search criteria exactly right for database searches that we are going to need to adjust to more of a google approach at some point. We need to look at how a user will find a person, for example, when they recall that the word "green" is somewhere in that person's demographic data (was it their eyes or the street they live on or city they are from or one of their children or the company for which they work?) We tend to force users to know the attribute (at least the type) they are searching along with any partial or full values for that type. I suspect that XML will play a role in the area of database search engines.
And ... XML is NOT based on relational data modeling theories (another thank goodness from me ;-).
There is one huge deficiency (OK, more than one, but one I'll point out) with XQuery compared to SQL -- XQuery is a read-only language at this point, although update standards are being addressed.
So, although XML is seen as an enemy "technology" to some database specialists and also to some distributed computing specialists, it is bringing with it some good news. [and, besides, for data exchange -- the best use of XML -- it was time to move on from comma-quote files anyway, right?]
Are there XQuery fans on this list? --dawn Received on Wed Mar 03 2004 - 04:10:57 CET