Re: [xml-dev] JDBC in an XQuery world (?)

[David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>]

This is one way of looking at it and perhaps the most fruitful.  But I disagree with the premise that jdbc MUST use SQL as the query language.  The difference between vendor's "SQL" is so vast they might as well be different languages.  So why not allow pure xquery as the JDBC query string?

But I agree there would be more portability If the language was SQL like.

As for the results .. Xquery returns xdm not XML so there needs to be a mapping of xdm to ResultSet interface.

Maybe not all xdm maps well but I could imagine a convention like say XDML which provides enough metadata to map the result XDM to a result set.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 2, 2011, at 12:23 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> 
> David Lee scripsit:
> 
>> Suppose we had a JDBC interface to  XQuery/XML databases ? Sure it wouldn't
>> be the best choice ... but then neither is using JDBC for Oracle or MySQL
> 
> JDBC is just a thin layer over SQL; JDBC clients construct SQL strings, possibly
> with variables in them.  So the question is: what would it mean for an
> XQuery database to expose a SQL API?  It would require a mapping of the
> XML data model onto a relational data model, which inevitably would
> require discarding some information.  What information exactly?  Would it
> be possible to access every XML document, or just some of them?
> 
> -- 
> A poetical purist named Cowan           [that's me: cowan@ccil.org]
> Once put the rest of us dowan.          [on xml-dev]
>    "Your verse would be sweeter        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
>    If it only had metre
> And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan."     [overpacked line!] --Michael Kay