Sun's JDBC spec lead for the past seven years, Jonathan Bruce has for the past 6 months been technology product evangelist for DataDirect, and is now championing XQuery, the query language for XML and relational data no matter where it lives, which he talked about with SYS-CON.TV (http://sys-con.tv) at Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston.

At Sun, Bruce had a lot of experience with SQL and query languages working with JDBC and trying to express that in the best possible way at the API level. "We really struggled with certain things that we just could not express because of the limitations and history of SQL when it came to dealing with XML in a graceful manner," he said, "whereas XQuery is a fully functional language so you can deal with XML as XML - you don't have to do any mapping. XQuery provides a flexible, well rounded means to manipulate XML data."

View Jonathan Bruce With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV  

Does this mean the death knell for SQL and relational based applications will toll in the near future?

Bruce thinks that this is unlikely. "The relational model remains a highly optimized model for data manipulation and applications will be continue to be built on this stack."

While a number of APIs have sprung up to ease the path to XML integration, Bruce explained - in particular JAXB - any application developer can quickly trip themselves up with a heavy load of XML data transformation and the large-scale binding of XML to runtime platforms such as Java.

"A transformation of any kind, in this instance from XML data to a DOM or SAX representation is both expensive and inherently non-scalable. Whereas XQuery has the tools to cleanly manipulate a vast amount of XML data while answering the call to integrate distributed and incompatible data sources." 

The DataDirect IDE, Stylus Studio, is what anyone can use to build their XML applications. DataDirect gave a session at Web Services Edge 2005 East in Boston called "XML Data Challenges" - which dealt with emerging standards such as XQuery, XQJ, and SQL/XML, and how they promise to revolutionize data exchange and the ways applications are developed, deployed, and utilized.


View Jonathan Bruce With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV