In fact the web is always the fundamental resource of information. In this case things are easy because for some unkown reasons I got a e-mail from www.datadirect.com inviting to a beginners seminar on XQUERY. Ok, why not it’s free, presented by Jonathan Robie, probably one of the most imporant persons on this matter and in fact my knowledge of XQUERY is quite restricted. It is so important to check current developments. XQUERY has much to do with databases and databases are the backbone of all large scale systems, typically build on SQL more or less confomant DBMS like MSSQL, Oracle and so on. But all this is well established, a big industry of its own, but my naive point of view is that the state of the art of databases has come to rest. Perhaps the really final form of XQUERY (yes, it is under construction for more than 8 years I think…) gives some more sexiness to database development. In fact the relational and table based view of real world aspects is pragmatic, successful and simple to describe, but many real world problems cannot be really visualized with tables. For example semantic relations are more graph ot tree like. Of course they can be serialized to fit into a standard database, but as a mathematician this is a little bit irritating because typically you localize the problem an loose the global picture.
Perhaps it sounds confusing, I will clarify it in a following post with some samples…

But first I hope the XQUERY webinar will give me some stimulations. I’ll report on it.

Finally of course it’s necessary to say that XQUERY has reached a good degree of seriousity. Thare are many implementations, for example in the new database system MSSQL Server 2005 . It has XQUERY support. Of course it is a fine thing by Microsoft to implement XQUERY, but it reminds me on the too-early implementation of XML Schema support in MSSQL 2000. In deed at that time XML Schema was not finished as a final W3C Recommendation and so it happened that Microsoft went its own way… Hope XQUERY will not be the next case for such a too-early implementation.