Making XQuery Control Structures Work for You

colleague of mine, a database programmer who had spent some time working with an early XQuery implementation, once referred to the language as the smiley language. When I asked whether that had to do with the simplicity of the language, he replied in Hungarian-accented English, "Oh, no, the language itself is a bear, but they made the comment delimiters into smileys (: :) to make you smile even as your database gets thrashed."

While not exactly a ringing indictment of the language, his comments served to highlight the fact that while XQuery has a structure similar to most languages have, the differences can trip you up dramatically. XQuery is not a hard language to learn, but it can be a language that makes you try to understand why it’s not working.

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Making XQuery Control Structures Work for You

The XQuery language is the XML analogue of SQL, designed to augment XPath 2.0 by working with sets of values, not just with single scalar values.