> > Can a XQuery engine work on this table structure?
> Yes.
>
> That is, some can and some can't, and some do it via SQL and
> JDBC or ODBC, and some perhaps more efficiently.
My experience so far of these hybrid relational/xml systems is that your
problem as a user is not a lack of functionality, but an excess. There are
simply too many ways of doing the same thing, and they have too many
irritating differences - different sets of functions, different rules for
case independence, different conventions for escaping special characters -
and different (unpredictably different) performance. I find it hard to
believe that this ugly hybrid of SQL and XQuery represents the future of
database technology. I find databases where everything is XML (or indeed
where everything is tables) much easier to work with.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
