White Papers

The following white papers (reports) have been added to our website to explain new developments concerning the Data Integration Suite. These reports include an explanation of the new development, and are here to help educate you about the Suite and its services.

Using the Data Integration Suite

Taming Data Chaos: Simplify Data Integration with DataDirect Data Integration Suite
Alone or in conjunction with other DataDirect solutions, such as Shadow (for mainframe access), the Data Integration Suite can help reverse rising costs via savings in multiple areas. This paper describes the Suite and its capabilities, and illustrates its value proposition with a variety of customer testimonials and use cases across diverse industries.

Helping the Insurance Industry with ACORD Standards
Learn how DataDirect XQuery is being used to help the insurance industry develop and manage applications that must adhere to ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards for the insurance, reinsurance, and related financial services industries.

VSJ Review: Data Integration Suite
The Data Integration Suite is a broad, sophisticated package that lets you create XML applications with very little coding. The pipeline editor and XQuery mapper are excellent designers and easy to use for application creation. The XQuery processor and converters let you use XQuery in your applications in a very simple way, and anyone used to JDBC will have no difficulty with that step.

XML & Relational Data

Updating Relational Data
DataDirect XQuery allows you to update relational data from within XQuery. This is useful for all XQuery applications that need to insert, update, or delete data in relational tables. The addition of update functionality makes DataDirect XQuery very well-suited for ETL application scenarios, where it provides efficient XML shredding and transparent relational updates.

Querying XML Columns
Increasingly, XML is stored in relational databases as structured XML. Some applications will continue to shred XML into a relational format or store XML as CLOB values. Other applications can now take advantage of relational databases that support a native XML data type to represent an XML document or XML document fragment. This paper shows how you can use DataDirect XQuery to query XML stored as character data and query XML stored as XML.

Web Services & SOA

Building XQuery Based Web Service Aggregation and Reporting Applications
With a vast amount of data being published in XML format by multiple sources, the need has arisen for an easy and efficient means of extracting and manipulating this information. XQuery has emerged as an ideal way to aggregate data from Web services, relational databases, and other applications that employ XML.

Performance and Optimization

DataDirect XQuery Performance: Generating SQL
Implementing XQuery efficiently for relational databases is not trivial, because XQuery and SQL support different operations on quite different data models. At DataDirect, we emphasized performance and scalability in the design of our XQuery engine from the beginning, with a strong focus on relational data. This paper presents some of the techniques we use to generate efficient SQL for relational databases to implement XQuery for these data sources.

Learn XQuery

Debunking XQuery myths and misunderstandings
You might think XQuery does everything and is well understood, but misconceptions and misunderstandings still exist in the software development community about XQuery. In this article, Frank Cohen details and clarifies many of the myths and misunderstandings that surround XQuery.

Resolving fn:collection() Errors
No standard way exists to access a relational table in XQuery, so each XQuery implementation defines its own way to do this. DataDirect XQuery uses fn:collection() to access a relational table. This paper provides guidelines to help you troubleshoot and correct common causes of errors that occur when using fn:collection() in an XQuery query.

Tips and Tricks
Tips and Tricks answers a lot of questions about how you can get the most bang for your buck by using inventive Data Integration Suite coding solutions and, of course, the power and added functionality available from the XQuery processor.