Oracle XML Enhancements

The following sections describe enhancements to Oracle XML.

1.11.3.1 Enhanced ANYDATA Support

Restrictions have been removed from the ANYDATA implementation that prevented its use with Abstract Data Types (ADT) that contained attributes whose data type was LOB or XMLType. This enhancement increases the flexibility of the Oracle ANYDATA implementation and it can now be used with database editions.

See Also:

Oracle Text Reference for details

See Also:

Oracle Text Reference for details

See Also:

Oracle Text Application Developer's Guide for details

See Also:

Unstructured Data

1.11.3.2 Integrated Oracle XQuery Implementation

This feature unifies the Oracle and BEA XQuery engines creating a single Java-based XQuery engine, supporting the XQuery 1.0 recommendation that can be used to leverage the XQuery language outside of Oracle Database. It also adds support for XQuery API for Java (XQJ) as an API which is the Java Specification Request (JSR) for executing XQuery statements from Java programs.

This feature allows customers to leverage the benefits of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XQuery language by consolidating the existing Oracle and WebLogic XQuery engines into a single engine that combines developer productivity with highly scalable and performant XQuery processing.

The new XQuery engine delivers support for the latest XQuery standard modules and XQuery update. It improves developer productivity by providing consistency with the XQuery engine used in Oracle Database, support for XQuery debugging, and support for XQJ.

The new engine is able to leverage other Oracle XML technology, including scalable Document Object Model (DOM) processing and the new binary XML formats used by Oracle Database and Oracle XML Developer's Kit. The XQuery engine is capable of processing very large documents and very large numbers of concurrent operations.

1.11.3.3 Oracle XDK/J DOM Improvements

This feature adds support for W3C DOM Level 3 Core API’s and reduces the memory footprint associated with using XML schemas.

These improvements allow developer's to leverage the benefits of the latest API's used for XML processing, as defined by the W3C, including those defined as part of the DOM Level 3.0 Core specification. This results in improved performance and scalability of the Oracle XDK/J DOM implementation by reducing the memory footprint of the DOM and improved support for Oracle's Scalable DOM (SDOM).

1.11.3.4 Domain Index Support of Hash Partitioned Tables

Applications that use domain indexes can now use hash partitioning methods. Oracle XML DB now has support for hash partitioning. Hash partitioning is an effective approach to balancing I/O evenly over a series of partitions.

1.11.3.5 Oracle XSLT or XPath Engine Interoperability

This feature enables the use of non-XDK-based data models with the Oracle XDK/J, XSLT, or XPath engine, which supports interoperability between these Oracle engines and third-party XML processors.

Interoperability between the Oracle XDK/J, XSLT, and XPath engines and third-party XML processors is enabled.

See Also:

Oracle XML Developer's Kit Programmer's Guide for details

See Also:

Oracle XML Developer's Kit Programmer's Guide for details

See Also:

Oracle Database Data Cartridge Developer's Guide and Oracle XML DB Developer's Guide for details

Unstructured Data

1.11.3.6 Programmatically Create and Manipulate Scalable DOM

In previous releases, a scalable Document Object Model (DOM) could only be created by Oracle's XML parser. This meant that a scalable DOM could only be created from an existing XML document. This feature removes this limitation by allowing developers to programmatically create and manipulate a new XML document, based on scalable DOM techniques, using standard DOM API’s.

This feature allows developers to create and manipulate very large XML documents programmatically by creating an instance of Oracle's scalable DOM, rather than a traditional in-memory DOM. The scalable DOM can then be manipulated using the standard DOM API’s provided by Oracle's XDK/J DOM implementation.

1.11.3.7 Standalone XQuery Virtual Machine

The full capabilities of the Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine can be accessed using a standalone application. This allows XQuery expressions to be performed directly from the command line without interacting with Oracle Database.

It also enhances the Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine to add support for the XQuery Update standard as well as the emerging XQuery scripting language. The Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine and database can also share the same native XML format, allowing the Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine to process XML from the database without having to incur the overhead of serializing and parsing the XML in question. The Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine is a powerful XQuery processor currently only available as part of Oracle Database. Enabling a standalone command-line mode allows the Oracle XQuery Virtual Machine to be used to execute XQuery operations in situations when running XQuery inside the database is not appropriate.

1.11.3.8 Support XQuery Full-Text Specification

This feature extends Oracle's support for the W3C XQuery specification by adding support for the XQuery full text extension. This enables customers to perform XML-aware full text searches on XML content stored in the database.

1.11.3.9 XDK/J Support for Fast Infoset

This feature adds support for the Fast Infoset to XDK/J model, enabling developers to use Fast Infoset techniques while working with XML content in Java.

Fast Infoset provides the following benefits in comparison with other formats:

■ It is more compact, parses faster, and serializes better than XML documents. ■ It parses five times faster than the Xerces parser, is three times faster at serializing,

and Fast Infoset documents are generally 20 to 60 percent smaller than the corresponding XML documents.

■ It leads other binary XML formats in performance and ration of compression, and

handles small to large documents in a more balanced manner. See Also:

Oracle XML DB Developer's Guide for details

See Also:

Unstructured Data

1.11.3.10 XmlDiff Support for XDK Java

This feature adds support for a Java-based XmlDiff that is format compatible with the existing C and PL/SQL XmlDiff capabilities introduced in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1).

This feature enables mid-tier programs written in pure Java to exchange XmlDiff output with programs written in C or programs which use Oracle Database to perform XmlDiff operations.

1.11.3.11 Support for XQuery Update

Support has been added for the XQuery update recommendation, allowing users to perform fragment and node-level updates using the W3C standard query language. This support allows users to perform fragment-level updates on XML content managed by Oracle XML DB in a performant and standards-based manner. This support also enables XML-based applications, that have been written using XQuery update syntax, to be ported to Oracle Database.

This feature improves developer productivity by replacing Oracle's XPath 1.0 based DML operators with a simpler standards-based approach that leverages the full benefits of XQuery.