I have a simple question, "Why do we need updates as part of the XQuery
language at all?"
I have read the latest XQuery Update proposal (from the "XQuery Update
Proposal" by Patrick Lehti) and the older XUpdate WD. I come from a
database background and view updates as imperative to the XQuery/XPath
language, but can't state "why". I'm getting a lot of grief regarding
having Updates at all. The types of "inserts" and "deletes" typically shown
are just adding/deleting a document from a "collection" (if collections
existed and they should IMHO).
Some examples are:
1. If I have a collection of XML invoices why would I ever want to update
these? An invoice is written once and never changed!
2. If I have a document centric collection of XML document I would most
likely version each document, thus why do we need updates?
3. If I have all my business contacts (companies I do business with) stored
in an XML collection, why wouldn't I just do a complete replace if I wanted
to change a companies name or address?
Does anyone have any real life scenarios/business cases that "MUST" have
updates?
thanks,
