Querying XML: XPath, XQuery, and XSLT

Zachary G. IvesUniversity of Pennsylvania

CIS 550 – Database & Information Systems

October 27, 2005

Some slide content courtesy of Susan Davidson, Dan Suciu, & Raghu Ramakrishnan

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Reminders

Homework 4 due 11/3 XQuery

Project plan due 11/3 Milestones Division of responsibilities For non-RSS projects: proposal including

scope, milestones, and what you plan to demonstrate

Recitation: Friday 11:30-12:30, Levine 512

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Talks of Interest

Today: Anastassia Ailamaki, CMU, “FATES: Automatically-tuned

Database Storage Management”, IRCS (3401 Walnut) Room 470 @ 3PM

Tomorrow as part of “DB & Information Retrieval Day”: Anastassia Ailamaki, CMU, “StagedDB: Designing Database

Servers for New Hardware Trends”, Wu and Chen @ 11AM Sam Madden, MIT, “Data Management for Next Generation

Wireless Sensor Networks”, Wu and Chen @ 12:30PM Andrei Broder, Yahoo!, “The next stage in Web IR: From

query based Information Retrieval to context driven Information Supply ”, Wu and Chen @ 2:30PM

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Querying XML

How do you query a directed graph? a tree?

The standard approach used by many XML, semistructured-data, and object query languages: Define some sort of a template describing

traversals from the root of the directed graph In XML, the basis of this template is called an

XPath

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XPaths

In its simplest form, an XPath is like a path in a file system:/mypath/subpath/*/morepath

The XPath returns a node set representing the XML nodes (and their subtrees) at the end of the path

XPaths can have node tests at the end, returning only particular node types, e.g., text(), processing-instruction(), comment(), element(), attribute()

XPath is fundamentally an ordered language: it can query in order-aware fashion, and it returns nodes in order

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Sample XML<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <dblp> <mastersthesis mdate="2002-01-03" key="ms/Brown92">  <author>Kurt P. Brown</author>   <title>PRPL: A Database Workload Specification Language</title>   <year>1992</year>   <school>Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison</school>   </mastersthesis> <article mdate="2002-01-03" key="tr/dec/SRC1997-018">  <editor>Paul R. McJones</editor>   <title>The 1995 SQL Reunion</title>   <journal>Digital System Research Center Report</journal>   <volume>SRC1997-018</volume>   <year>1997</year>   <ee>db/labs/dec/SRC1997-018.html</ee>   <ee>http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/</ee>   </article>

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XML Data Model VisualizedRoot

?xml dblp

mastersthesis article

mdate key

author title year school editor title yearjournal volume eeee

mdatekey

2002…

ms/Brown92

Kurt P….

PRPL…

1992

Univ….

2002…

tr/dec/…

Paul R.

The…

Digital…

SRC…

1997

db/labs/dec

http://www.

attributeroot

p-i element

text

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Some Example XPath Queries

/dblp/mastersthesis/title /dblp/*/editor //title //title/text()

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Context Nodes and Relative Paths

XPath has a notion of a context node: it’s analogous to a current directory “.” represents this context node “..” represents the parent node We can express relative paths:

subpath/sub-subpath/../.. gets us back to the context node

By default, the document root is the context node

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Predicates – Selection Operations

A predicate allows us to filter the node set based on selection-like conditions over sub-XPaths:

/dblp/article[title = “Paper1”]

which is equivalent to:

/dblp/article[./title/text() = “Paper1”]

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Axes: More Complex Traversals

Thus far, we’ve seen XPath expressions that go down the tree (and up one step) But we might want to go up, left, right, etc. These are expressed with so-called axes:

self::path-step child::path-step parent::path-step descendant::path-step ancestor::path-step descendant-or-self::path-step ancestor-or-self::path-

step preceding-sibling::path-step following-sibling::path-step preceding::path-step following::path-step

The previous XPaths we saw were in “abbreviated form”

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Querying Order

We saw in the previous slide that we could query for preceding or following siblings or nodes

We can also query a node for its position according to some index: fn:first() , fn:last() return index of 0th & last

element matching the last step: fn:position() gives the relative count of the

current node

child::article[fn:position() = fn:last()]

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Users of XPath

XML Schema uses simple XPaths in defining keys and uniqueness constraints

XQuery XSLT XLink and XPointer, hyperlinks for XML

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XQuery

A strongly-typed, Turing-complete XML manipulation language Attempts to do static typechecking against XML Schema Based on an object model derived from Schema

Unlike SQL, fully compositional, highly orthogonal: Inputs & outputs collections (sequences or bags) of XML

nodes Anywhere a particular type of object may be used, may use

the results of a query of the same type Designed mostly by DB and functional language people

Attempts to satisfy the needs of data management and document management The database-style core is mostly complete (even has

support for NULLs in XML!!) The document keyword querying features are still in the

works – shows in the order-preserving default model

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XQuery’s Basic Form

Has an analogous form to SQL’s SELECT..FROM..WHERE..GROUP BY..ORDER BY

The model: bind nodes (or node sets) to variables; operate over each legal combination of bindings; produce a set of nodes

“FLWOR” statement [note case sensitivity!]:for {iterators that bind variables}let {collections}where {conditions}order by {order-conditions} (older version was

“SORTBY”)return {output constructor}

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“Iterations” in XQuery

A series of (possibly nested) FOR statements assigning the results of XPaths to variables

for $root in document(“http://my.org/my.xml”)for $sub in $root/rootElement,

$sub2 in $sub/subElement, …

Something like a template that pattern-matches, produces a “binding tuple”

For each of these, we evaluate the WHERE and possibly output the RETURN template

document() or doc() function specifies an input file as a URI Old version was “document”; now “doc” but it depends on

your XQuery implementation

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Two XQuery Examples

<root-tag> {for $p in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/proceedings, $yr in $p/yrwhere $yr = “1999”return <proc> {$p} </proc>

} </root-tag>

for $i in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/inproceedings[author/text() = “John Smith”]

return <smith-paper><title>{ $i/title/text() }</title><key>{ $i/@key }</key>{ $i/crossref }

</smith-paper>

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Nesting in XQuery

Nesting XML trees is perhaps the most common operationIn XQuery, it’s easy – put a subquery in the return clause where

you want things to repeat!

for $u in document(“dblp.xml”)/universitieswhere $u/country = “USA”return <ms-theses-99>

{ $u/title } { for $mt in $u/../mastersthesis where $mt/year/text() = “1999” and

____________ return $mt/title }

</ms-theses-99>

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Collections & Aggregation in XQuery

In XQuery, many operations return collections XPaths, sub-XQueries, functions over these, … The let clause assigns the results to a variable

Aggregation simply applies a function over a collection, where the function returns a value (very elegant!)

let $allpapers := document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/articlereturn <article-authors>

<count> { fn:count(fn:distinct-values($allpapers/authors)) } </count>

{ for $paper in doc(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/articlelet $pauth := $paper/authorreturn <paper> {$paper/title}

<count> { fn:count($pauth) } </count> </paper>

} </article-authors>

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Collections, Ctd.

Unlike in SQL, we can compose aggregations and create new collections from old:

<result> {let $avgItemsSold := fn:avg(

for $order in document(“my.xml”)/orders/orderlet $totalSold = fn:sum($order/item/quantity)return $totalSold)return $avgItemsSold

} </result>

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Distinct-ness

In XQuery, DISTINCT-ness happens as a function over a collection But since we have nodes, we can do duplicate

removal according to value or node Can do fn:distinct-values(collection) to remove

duplicate values, or fn:distinct-nodes(collection) to remove duplicate nodes

for $years in fn:distinct-values(doc(“dblp.xml”)//year/text()

return $years

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Sorting in XQuery

SQL actually allows you to sort its output, with a special ORDER BY clause (which we haven’t discussed, but which specifies a sort key list)

XQuery borrows this idea In XQuery, what we order is the sequence of

“result tuples” output by the return clause:

for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/proceedingsorder by $x/title/text()return $x

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What If Order Doesn’t Matter?

By default: SQL is unordered XQuery is ordered everywhere! But unordered queries are much faster to

answer

XQuery has a way of telling the query engine to avoid preserving order: unordered {

for $x in (mypath) …}

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Querying & Defining Metadata – Can’t Do This in SQL

Can get a node’s name by querying node-name():for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/*return node-name($x)

Can construct elements and attributes using computed names:

for $x in document(“dblp.xml”)/dblp/*,$year in $x/year,$title in $x/title/text(),

element node-name($x) {attribute {“year-” + $year} { $title }

}

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XQuery Summary

Very flexible and powerful language for XML Clean and orthogonal: can always replace a

collection with an expression that creates collections

DB and document-oriented (we hope) The core is relatively clean and easy to

understand

Turing Complete – we’ll talk more about XQuery functions soon

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XSL(T): The Bridge Back to HTML

XSL (XML Stylesheet Language) is actually divided into two parts: XSL:FO: formatting for XML XSLT: a special transformation language

We’ll leave XSL:FO for you to read off www.w3.org, if you’re interested

XSLT is actually able to convert from XML HTML, which is how many people do their formatting today Products like Apache Cocoon generally translate XML

HTML on the server side

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A Different Style of Language

XSLT is based on a series of templates that match different parts of an XML document There’s a policy for what rule or template is applied if

more than one matches (it’s not what you’d think!) XSLT templates can invoke other templates XSLT templates can be nonterminating (beware!)

XSLT templates are based on XPath “match”es, and we can also apply other templates (potentially to “select”ed XPaths) Within each template, we describe what should be

output (Matches to text default to outputting it)

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An XSLT Stylesheet

<xsl:stylesheet version=“1.1”> <xsl:template match=“/dblp”> <html><head>This is DBLP</head> <body> <xsl:apply-templates /> </body> </html> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match=“inproceedings”>

<h2><xsl:apply-templates select=“title” /></h2> <p><xsl:apply-templates select=“author”/></p> </xsl:template> …</xsl:stylesheet>

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Results of XSLT Stylesheet

<dblp> <inproceedings> <title>Paper1</title> <author>Smith</author> </inproceedings> <inproceedings>

<author>Chakrabarti</author>

<author>Gray</author> <title>Paper2</title> </inproceedings></dblp>

<html><head>This Is DBLP</head>

<body> <h2>Paper1</h2> <p>Smith</p> <h2>Paper2</h2> <p>Chakrabarti</p> <p>Gray</p></body></html>

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What XSLT Can and Can’t Do

XSLT is great at converting XML to other formats XML diagrams in SVG; HTML; LaTeX …

XSLT doesn’t do joins (well), it only works on one XML file at a time, and it’s limited in certain respects It’s not a query language, really … But it’s a very good formatting language

Most web browsers (post Netscape 4.7x) support XSLT and XSL formatting objects

But most real implementations use XSLT with something like Apache Cocoon

You may want to use XSL/XSLT for your projects – see www.w3.org/TR/xslt for the spec

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Querying XML

We’ve seen three XML manipulation formalisms today: XPath: the basic language for “projecting and

selecting” (evaluating path expressions and predicates) over XML

XQuery: a statically typed, Turing-complete XML processing language

XSLT: a template-based language for transforming XML documents

Each is extremely useful for certain applications!

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Views in SQL and XQuery A view is a named query We use the name of the view to invoke the query

(treating it as if it were the relation it returns)

SQL:CREATE VIEW V(A,B,C) AS

SELECT A,B,C FROM R WHERE R.A = “123”

XQuery:declare function V() as element(content)* {

for $r in doc(“R”)/root/tree, $a in $r/a, $b in $r/b, $c in $r/cwhere $a = “123”return <content>{$a, $b, $c}</content>

}

SELECT * FROM V, RWHERE V.B = 5 AND V.C = R.C

for $v in V()/content, $r in doc(“r”)/root/treewhere $v/b = $r/breturn $v

Using the views:

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What’s Useful about Views

Providing security/access control We can assign users permissions on different views Can select or project so we only reveal what we want!

Can be used as relations in other queries Allows the user to query things that make more sense

Describe transformations from one schema (the base relations) to another (the output of the view) The basis of converting from XML to relations or vice

versa This will be incredibly useful in data integration,

discussed soon…

Allow us to define recursive queries

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Materialized vs. Virtual Views

A virtual view is a named query that is actually re-computed every time – it is merged with the referencing query

CREATE VIEW V(A,B,C) AS

SELECT A,B,C FROM R WHERE R.A = “123”

A materialized view is one that is computed once and its results are stored as a table Think of this as a cached answer These are incredibly useful! Techniques exist for using materialized views to answer other

queries Materialized views are the basis of relating tables in different

schemas

SELECT * FROM V, RWHERE V.B = 5 AND V.C = R.C

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Views Should Stay Fresh

Views (sometimes called intensional relations) behave, from the perspective of a query language, exactly like base relations (extensional relations)

But there’s an association that should be maintained: If tuples change in the base relation, they should

change in the view (whether it’s materialized or not)

If tuples change in the view, that should reflect in the base relation(s)

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View Maintenance and the View Update Problem

There exist algorithms to incrementally recompute a materialized view when the base relations change

We can try to propagate view changes to the base relations However, there are lots of views that aren’t easily

updatable:

We can ensure views are updatable by enforcing certain constraints (e.g., no aggregation),but this limits the kinds of views we can have!

A B

1 2

2 2

B C

2 4

2 3

R S A B C

1 2 4

1 2 3

2 2 4

2 2 3

R⋈S

delete?

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Next Time

Can we have views in XML over tables in relations?

… Or vice versa?

What other things can we use views for