MacLochlainns Weblog

I promised my students an example of writing xquery statements in Microsoft SQL Server. This post builds on two earlier posts. The first qualifies how to build a marvel table with source data, and the second qualifies how you can create an XML Schema Collection and insert relational data into an XML structure.

You can query a sequence with xquery as follows:

DECLARE @x xml;
SET @x = N'';
SELECT @x.query('(1,2,(10,11,12,13,14,15)),-6');

It returns:

1 2 10 11 12 13 14 15 -6

You can query a sequence with an xquery FLOWR statement. FLOWR stands for: FOR, LET, ORDER BY, WHERE, and RETURN. A sample xquery with a FLOWER statement is:

DECLARE @x xml;
SET @x = N'';
SELECT @x.query('for $i in ((1,2,(10,11,12,13,14,15)),-6)
                 order by $i
                 return $i');

It returns:

-6 1 2 10 11 12 13 14 15

You can query the entire node tree with the following xquery statement because it looks for the occurrence of any node with the /* search string:

DECLARE @x xml;
SET @x = N'<marvel>
             <avenger_name>Captain America</avenger_name>
           </marvel>';
SELECT @x.query('/*');

You can query the avenger_name elements from the marvel_xml table with the following syntax:

SELECT xml_table.query('/marvel/avenger_name')
FROM   marvel_xml;

It returns the following set of avenger_name elements:

<avenger_name>Hulk</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Iron Man</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Black Widow</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Thor</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Captain America</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Hawkeye</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Winter Soldier</avenger_name>
<avenger_name>Iron Patriot</avenger_name>

You can query the fourth avenger_name element from the marvel_xml table with the following xquery statement:

SELECT xml_table.query('/marvel[4]/avenger_name')
FROM   marvel_xml;

It returns the following avenger_name element:

<avenger_name>Thor</avenger_name>

You can use the value() function to verify an avenger_name element exists:

SELECT CASE
          WHEN xml_table.value('(/marvel[4]/avenger_name)','nvarchar') = 'T' THEN
            'Exists'
       END AS "Verified"
FROM   marvel_xml
WHERE  id = 3;

The query returns the Exists string when it finds a valid avenger_name element. You have a number of other tools to query results sets from the XML node tree.

I hope this helps my students and anybody interested in writing xquery-enable queries.