XQuery & XML databases

Question

I decided to learn XML from a professional book instead of reading tutorials online, after some research i decided to read "Beginning XML, 4th Ed" book and it was very interesting book and i recommend it to anyone want to learn XML, my question is: does reading & learning these chapters:

1. XQuery, the XML Query Language

2. XML and Databases

really required for someone who is doing mainly:

Hibernate/JPA for object/relational persistence? or in other words does learning XQuery & XML databases really required by the current industry standards skills ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you are arranging data using XML, you will need to:

1. Persist the data
2. Query the data

There are various ways to do both 1 and 2. Databases designed for XML storage as you have read about for 1, and XQuery for 2.

Probably more popular than XQuery is XPath which is the basis of XSL transform. And probably more popular for storage is just the plain old file system, but this leads to generally only using XML for fairly static data.

So to the point of your question... I use XML all the time, but not XQuery, nor an XML database.