XQuery for Next Generation DBMSs: Challenges in Realizing the Promise

The next generation of data management solutions must persist and
process business objects, documents, and relational records in an
integrated system. Transactional DBMSs, business intelligence
analytics, and document systems must converge into one system,
supporting powerful functionality to integrate the information that
resides in individual silos of information. To support the needs and
expectations of tomorrow's customers, this information must be
disseminated to a vast number of users, far exceeding the demands on
todays data management systems.

XML has emerged as the industry standard for representing and
exchanging data and is already predominant in todays applications.
Business, analytic and structured data will be exchanged as XML
between applications and web services.  XQuery is a query language
recommended by W3C, which is designed to be applicable across many
types of data sources.  However, compared to the power of SQL, many
features are still missing, such as the ability to clearly specify
OLAP types of queries. In this talk I will give my perspective on the
current state of the XQuery language, and highlight some areas where I
feel extensions to the language will be required for XQuery to realize
its promise.