The official candidate recommendation versions of the XQuery specifications have been published by the W3C at http://www.w3.org/TR/#CR . The details of the specific documents are as follows: XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language http://www.w3.org/TR/2005...

We have had several requests through our message boards for details on how to execute dynamic XQuery expressions. A dynamic XQuery expression is one whose exact details are not know at the time when the query is written. For example, consider the following...

The XQuery Testing Task Force is pleased to announce the publication of version 0.7 of our XQuery test suite. Please visit http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/test-suite/ for details.

I posted a previous blog entry dealing with the static typing consequences of using the parent axis in your XQuery expressions over XML data inside SQL Server 2005 ( Static Typing Consequences of the Parent Axis ). In addition to the general issue of...

Several of the other features within SQL Server 2005 leverage the XML data-type to pass information around. For example, both Service Broker and triggers transfer data around the server in XML data-type instances. This means that you can easily leverage...

SQL Server 2005 has an XQuery implementation that provides full support for the parent axis, as defined in the XPath specification. Since our XQuery implementation is statically typed, we also support the static typing of the parent axis, as defined in...

The W3C XQuery Testing Task Force (of which I am a member) has released version 0.6 of the XML Query Test Suite. This is currently available at http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/test-suite/ . The test suite consists of XQuery expressions, results and source...

There are a number of cases where it would be useful to be able to run XQuery statements over the result of an XQuery expression which constructs new values. Unfortunately, directly querying over constructed XML is not supported in SQL Server 2005, so...

There are often cases where we need to perform operations based on multiple XML instances. To illustrate this, consider the example XML given below. Basically, we have two XML instances. The first instance (call this the results instance ) contains information...

XQuery uses the concept of a namespace, adopted from the XML 1.0 specification. But, due to the complex nature of the XQuery language and it's dual roles as both query and serialization/XML construction language, there are several nuances to the use of...

A common task when dealing with XML data is to apply an XSLT style-sheet to the raw XML data in order to display it better. In a previous post to this blog, I showed how to append a processing instruction to your XML data in order to get IE to do the...

A common requirement for an XML based application is the ability to do some form of simple string building. For example, the following query outputs a set of elements whose values are built up as a string, depending on some other value that is passed...

Last week I covered the basics of property promotion i.e. automatically extracting data from an XML instance and storing this as relational data in order to improve query readability and/or performance. If you missed this previous post, you can access...

In many cases, when storing XML data, some of the elements/attributes will be more important for storage/querying than others. Access to values inside XML data-type instances requires additional overhead when compared with just selecting relational data...

A common requirement for formatting XML output from XQuery expressions, is to be able to add a style-sheet declaration. Style-sheet declarations consist of a standard processing-instruction node that appears at the top-level of the XML. In the following...

Michael Rys (a program manager for XML technologies in SQL Server 2005) recently gave a webcast for MSDN where he covers some of the details of the new native XML data type. He gives details of basic usage, static typing, DML and indexing. Michael also...

I have added a new section under my links that points to useful whitepapers dealing with XQuery and/or XML inside SQL Server 2005. These articles contain a lot of useful details on the system and I would recommend that everyone using (or planning on using...

I just reviewed the web cast of a presentation given by one of our program managers here in the SQL Server XML team. It gives a good overview of the various features of our native XML data type, including insertion, indexing, DML and schema binding. If...

There are several tricky issues around the serialization of special XML characters inside SQL Server 2005. This was highlighted to me earlier today when I had a question about how to output a URL value that caontains an ampersand (' & ') character...

One of the limitations of using XQuery inside SQL Server 2005 is that you are limited to running your expressions over a single XML data type instance. It is usually possible to insert your XML into the database so that this is not a problem (e.g. placing...

My fellow Microsoft Mike (Michael Rys) has just posted an article on his blog highlighting the use of the new T-SQL with xmlnamespaces syntax. This syntax allows you to simplfy your XQuery statements by defining namespaces in the T-SQL world and having...

XQuery inside SQL Server 2005 implements a set of rules that enable us to catch potential problems with the user query at compile time, based on static analysis of the query. The complete rules for static analysis of XQuery expressions are detailed in...

Using SQL datetime and smalldatetime values inside XQuery...

Welcome to my blog dealing with using XQuery inside of SQL Server 2005. As an introduction to the kind of information I intend to populate this blog with, I have started off writing an atricle on how to take the examples from the XQuery Use Case documents...