Extending XQuery for Analytics Kevin S. Beyer, Donald D. Chamberlin, Latha S. Colby, Fatma Ozcan, Hamid Pirahesh, and Yu Xu   View Paper (PDF)   Return to XML Query, Update, and Search (Research) Abstract XQuery is a query language under development by the W3C XML Query Working Group. The language contains constructs for navigating, searching, and restructuring XML data. With XML gaining importance as the standard for representing busi-ness data, XQuery must support the types of queries that are common in business analytics. One such class of queries is OLAP-style aggregation queries. Although these queries are expressible in XQuery Version 1, the lack of explicit grouping constructs makes the construction of these queries non-intuitive and places a burden on the XQuery engine to recognize and opti-mize the implicit grouping constructs. Furthermore, although the flexibility of the XML data model provides an opportunity for advanced forms of grouping that are not easily represented in relational systems, these queries are difficult to express using the current XQuery syntax. In this paper, we provide a proposal for extending the XQuery FLWOR expression with explicit syntax for grouping and for numbering of results. We show that these new XQuery constructs not only simplify the construction and evaluation of queries requiring grouping and ranking but also enable complex analytic queries such as moving-window aggre-gation and rollups along dynamic hierarchies to be expressed without additional language extensions. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery