XQuery

XQuery is an XML query language for retrieving and interpreting information from diverse sources. These links will help you learn and understand XQuery.

Query Language

Transact-SQL supports a subset of the XQuery language that is used for querying the xml data type. This XQuery implementation is aligned with the July 2004 Working Draft of XQuery. The language is under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the participation of all major database vendors and also Microsoft. Because the W3C specifications may undergo future revisions before becoming a W3C recommendation, this implementation may be different from the final recommendation. This topic outlines the semantics and syntax of the subset of XQuery that is supported in SQL Server.

For more information, see the W3C XQuery 1.0 Language Specification.

XQuery is a language that can query structured or semi-structured XML data. With the xml data type support provided in the Database Engine, documents can be stored in a database and then queried by using XQuery.

XQuery is based on the existing XPath query language, with support added for better iteration, better sorting results, and the ability to construct the necessary XML. XQuery operates on the XQuery Data Model. This is an abstraction of XML documents, and the XQuery results that can be typed or untyped. The type information is based on the types provided by the W3C XML Schema language. If no typing information is available, XQuery handles the data as untyped. This is similar to how XPath version 1.0 handles XML.