Paolo,

| However, one of the guys from the Oracle Intermedia team
| I talked with today, wasn't even familiar with XPath.

interMedia Text supports powerful full text searching,
in addition to its new XML-structure-sensitive searching
that was introduced in Oracle8i. It does not today support
an XPath syntax for pattern matching, but rather the 
SQL-centric CONTAINS() syntax. Where you might use an XPath
predicate like:

   A/B/C[contains(.,'Clinton')]

in XPath, interMedia supports the predicate:

  CONTAINS(fragment_column,
           'Clinton within C within B within A')

The CONTAINS(item,'search pattern') syntax is a SQL-centric
standard. Since it's SQL that means developers can combine 
any traditional SQL query predicate with searches over XML
document fragments as well in the same query.

| Even so, XPath seems to be far from the plans of this team. 

All you can conclude is that the plans are not known
to this particular developer. We've demoed publically
our prototype XPath query support over relational database
contents, and have work well underway to unify XPath 
queryability over both tables and document fragment contents, 
so the moral of the story is please "stay tuned".

| I am not saying that one should directly use XPath to get the
| nodes but yes that XPath could be used in a "WHERE"
| clause of a SQL statement to help expressing the selection
| of the documents containing nodes matching a XPath
| expression. That would be similar to the current syntax,
| althought XPath is shorter, more powerful and familiar
| to "XML developers".

Again, please "stay tuned".
______________________________________________________________
Steve Muench, Lead XML Evangelist & Consulting Product Manager
Business Components for Java & XSQL Servlet Development Teams
Oracle Rep to the W3C XSL Working Group
Author "Building Oracle XML Applications", O'Reilly, Oct 2000



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