XML-QL Follow up

Rob Schoening (rob@xenex.com)
Tue, 27 Oct 1998 19:01:53 -0800

XML-QL seems well suited to doing queries on single XML documents.
However, it doesn't seem to be particularly well suited for searching
through sets of documents. I'm thinking of a database that could treat DTDs
the way relational databases treat their relations. Ideally I'd like to
submit a query and retrieve a set of results corresponding to the XML
documents (tuples) that satisfy the query.

For instance, I'd like to be able to issue something like:

select * from invoices where value(<total>) > 1000

or

select * from musicians where name like 'Garcia'

which might return URIs to the documents fitting the criteria. It would be
a hybrid web/database server...kind of an dynamic ORDBMS. The clumsiness of
ODBMS and ORDBMS systems could be eliminated since XML text is
self-descriptive. The software and administrative overhead of getting data
in and out of a database could be eliminated.

Does this interest anyone? I'd like to start a project along these lines.
Is this just a pipe dream? Practical? Impractical? Useful? Useless?

I'd appreciate any comments.

Rob