On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 10:19:57AM +0800, kla gw wrote:

I'm interested in ordered XPath. How much support of ordered XPath that monetDB has?

In MonetDB, I found that the following XPath:

/a/b/c/preceding-sibling::*[1] /a/b/c/preceding-sibling::d[1]

return the first node according to document order, not according to reverse document order (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/ section 3.2.1.1 and 3.2.2)

I tried using bib.xml from XQuery Use Cases (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-use-cases/#xmp-data) and compare the result with commercial XML editor.

Hi Klarinda, you are right. MonetDB/XQuery does not fully comply with the W3C specs here. Instead, we do not distinguish between forward and reverse axes, but always interpret positional predicates in document order. This is mainly for historic reasons. Earlier W3C specifications have been quite unclear about the semantics of positional predicates and reverse axes and parts of our code date back to that time. Unfortunately, the design of our code makes it non-trivial to fix this problem, and I guess we (you) will have to live with it for now. Nevertheless, I will particularly look into this issue and see if I can still find a solution. On the other hand, this is the only situation that comes to my mind, where we actually do violate XQuery's ordering requirements. In fact, our current development version not only correctly implements XQuery's order constraints, but will also exploit the fact that order does *not* matter in certain situations. The observable effect is a significant improvement in query performance under such circumstances. Regards, Jens -- Jens Teubner Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Department of Informatics D-85748 Garching, Germany Tel: +49 89 289-17259 Fax: +49 89 289-17263 SQL0437W Performance of this complex query may be sub-optimal. Reason code: "3". SQLSTATE=01602 -- IBM DB2 V7.1 Warning Message