Ivan Lagunov's Blog

This post is about the good practice on how to handle the data issues with XQuery. We store a huge amount of xml data in Sedna XML database , and there happen to be synchronization issues with external systems resulting in xml data issues. One of possible consequences is that an XQuery function may receive an input parameter of an unexpected type. The limitation of the problem is that Sedna supports only XQuery 1.0 and not XQuery 3.0 . As a result, try/catch expressions are not yet available for Sedna that makes handling issues harder and nastier. BTW, a while ago I created a feature request for Sedna to add support of XQuery 3.0 - you're welcome to upvote it ! Issue description Here is the initial XQuery that simply returns the subtitle tag value. declare function vp:getMapSubtitle($vp as element(value-proposition)?) as xs:string? { data($vp/topicmeta/subtitle) }; We faced a data issue when there appeared two value propositions as an input parameter $vp . It result...

I've just discovered that it's possible to process comment nodes using XQuery. Ideally it should not be the case if you take part in designing your data formats, then you should simply store valuable data in plain xml. But I have to deal with OntoML data source that uses a bit peculiar format while export to XML, i.e. some data fields are stored inside XML comments. So here is an example how to solve this problem. XML example This is an example stub of one real xml with irrelevant data omitted. There are several thousands of xmls like this stored in Sedna XML DB collection. Finally, I need to extract the list of pairs for the complete collection: identifier (i.e. SOT1209 ) and saved timestamp (i.e. 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT ). <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <!--EXPORT_PROGRAM:=eptos-iso29002-10-Export-V10--> <!--File saved on: 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT--> <!--XML Schema used: V099--> <cat:catalogue xmlns:cat=...