1	Making a fool of myself in 5 minutes or less Daniela Florescu Oracle Corp. BEA Systems XQRL Propel Crossgain INRIA
2	(Approximate) citations “XQuery and the other W3C standards are too complicated. It’s impossible to work with them” Surajit Chaudhuri, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Gerhard Weikum “Relational databases have a query language, XML no” Pat Helland “XQuery is too complicated” Dave DeWitt “XQuery failed” Michael Stonebraker
3	Coming out of the closet I don’t like XML that much… I hate namespaces… I never managed to finish reading certain sections of XML Schema, my head hurts… I don’t even always like XQuery … But: Don’t get me started on technologies that I don’t find elegant or perfect, starting with SQL… I am not crazy enough to believe that the world cares about what I like (or not)
4	The reality “It’s a historical necessity !” Lenin about the communism Me about XML XML := the name of a community of people that have lots of information and don’t know what to do with it, I.e. how to represent it, how to store it, how to process it. They gather together and speak about their problems Their problems are worth hundreds of billions of $$$. where Information := all the stuff that can be written down digitally
5	So please… Give it a try to XML and XQuery… If your head hurts, please send email to Don Chamberlin, Mary Fernandez, Jerome Simeon, Michael Rys, Michael Kay, Jonathan Robie Phil Wadler, Humbly myself Many, many others and they’ll bring you tea, and hold your hand in those difficult moments Don’t get stuck with the (sometimes ugly) details, just look at what one can do with it !
6	The database field evolving… ” “a collection of models, tools and algorithms for data management that guarantee scalability” Small editing corrections for the 21 century. “a collection of models, tools and algorithms for data management that guarantee scalability In an ever changing environment”
7	Declarativity and the real world “Dissociate the logic of the processing from how and where the information is actually processed.” My recent personal reality check: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200412/threads.html More then 150 answers in 2 days “Declarative systems don’t work. Programmers know better how to do memory allocation and parallelization by hand. They don’t buy your stuff.” X.Y@Z.com We take declarativity for granted, and this might be a mistake.
8	What does XQuery has to do with this ? Perfect or not, XQuery has an important role to play in the IT ecosystem Brings declarativity in information processing. Is only a first and timid step in this direction. If we miss this train, the next opportunity for declarativity in information processing will be in 15-20 years.
9	My “outrageous” claim In 15-20 years from now: Information will stay only in XML (no more tuples, no more objects) Imperative languages as we know them today (Java, C, C++, C#) will be gone We will program with some extension of XQuery, or in any case a declarative dataflow/workflow language specially designed for XML processing, SOA, and for enabling universal information flow. The sooner we go there the better.