Looking to gauge the communities needs/desire/thoughts about upgrading our processing engine to support XQuery. Typically the benefit vs risk is not sufficient as XPath 1.0 supports most capabilities. This thread is intended to start a discussion around whether or not the risk is worth the reward for future releases.
by: Tom B. | over a year ago | Other
Comments
Dream scenario would be to have XPATH + XSLT 3.1 and streaming support added so that large XML input stops being such a bottleneck for us in driver development. A 200Mb XML input doc should not choke IDM, but it does. Having support for millions or billions of objects at Flaim level doesn't help if we can't import moderately sized raw data because we can't stream or pre-process it into discrete chunks that IDM likes.
XSLT - should be a key part of the discussion regardless. It is with XSLT that we see the biggest downside to being stuck on the 1.x era tech.
Implementation wise this should be enabled/disabled via an ECV on a per driver/driverset level.
Getting xPath 2.0 (and possible xQuery) would make things very much simpler.
One of the major issues which many people face is that do-query is very limited, meaning it's only possible to query with fixed values, eg. wild cards are not allowed in attribute matching.
Which means that sometimes a query will result in thousands of results, which one then have to loop through. With xPath it is possible to filter using wildcards (contains with xPath v1.1), and with xPath 2.0 we would get lower-case, upper-case, and last but not least matches. Matches will allow us to use regEx to filter on node sets, which would make processing of large result documents faster, and very much easier than what we are faced with today.
Make it optional if one wants to use xPath 1.x or 2.0 via an ECV....