I was pleased to see in my Inbox RSS Reader this morning news that XQuery has been made a standard by the W3C. Here's the press release.
When we started Ipedo back in mid-2000, I remember all the vague nods when I would ask people if they knew what XQuery was. Now, as you can see from the release, there are over 40 products that support XQuery.
I would like to take a moment to thank all of the contributors to the spec. As you can read, they have taken over 1000 comments and created over 14,000 (!) use cases, in a really short period of time. And they have taken flak for it, which I debunked here, since XQuery became a standard in about half the time it took SQL (okay, so I was off by a month...).
For us at Ipedo, not only is this a vindication of our initial vision, but a tremendous opportunity for us and our customers. The volume of XML has never been greater - from contract documents (ACORD, MISMO, FpML) to RSS feeds, it grows every day. And with Ipedo being the only vendor with combined SQL/XQuery federation, it means Ipedo can federate over all that XML data in Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server. Not only have we been keeping our engine up to spec over the years, even being one of the first vendors to run conformance tests, but our customers get the benefit of years of real world production use and tuning in the field.
So today, I answer this question for the final time: "Is XQuery a standard yet?"
A resounding "Yes."
Comments