Making a fool of myself in 5 minutes or less

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. Its 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

Why do you all look at me ?
3
Coming out of the closet

• I dont like XML
• I hate namespaces
• I never managed to finish reading certain
  sections of XML Schema
• I dont even like XQuery
• But
• Dont get me started on technologies that I dont
  like
• I am not crazy enough to believe that the world
  cares about what I like (or not)

4
The reality

• Its a historical necessity !
• Lenin about the communism
• Me about XML
• XML the name of a community of people that
  have lots of information (I.e. stuff that can be
  written down digitally) and dont know what to do
  with it.

5
But still.

• Give it a try
• If your head hurts, send email to
• Don Chamberlin,
• Mary Fernandez,
• Jerome Simeon,
• Michael Rys,
• Michael Kay,
• Phil Wadler,
• Many, many others
• and theyll bring you tea, and hold your hand in
  those difficult moments
• Dont get stuck with the ugly details, just look
  at what one can do with it !

You will be amazed.
6
The database field

• a collection of models, tools and algorithms
  for data management that guarantee scalability
• Small editing corrections
• a collection of models, tools and algorithms for
  
• data management that guarantee scalability
• In an ever changing environment

Change data To information
Change Mb -gt Gb -gt Tb To scale to the level of
the Web of data feeds
of data models of physical
locations of users
Change store, put, get To management through
the entire lifetime of the information
One principle is indispensable for this goal
declarativity
7
Declarativity and the real world

• Dissociate the logic of the processing from how
  and where the information is actually processed.
• My personal reality checks
• http//lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200412/threa
  ds.html
• More then 150 answers in 2 days
• Declarative systems dont work. Programmers know
  better how to do memory allocation and
  parallelization by hand. They dont buy your
  stuff.
• 
  X.Y_at_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
  and SOA.
• The sooner we go there the better.