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Oracle9i Application Developer's Guide - XML
Release 1 (9.0.1)

Part Number A88894-01
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What's New in Oracle XML-Enabled Technology?

This section describes the new features in the following releases:

XML Features Introduced with Oracle9i, Release 1 (9.0.1)

Here are the new XML features in Oracle9i Release 1 (9.0.1):

XDK for Java
XML SQL Utility (XSU) Features
Database XML Related Enhancements

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard format developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for representing structured and unstructured data on the Web. Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) identify resources such as Web pages anywhere on the Web. Oracle provides types to handle XML and URI data, as well as a class of URIs called DBUri-REFs to access data stored within the database itself. It also provides a new set of types to store and access both external and internal URIs from within the database.

XMLType

This (new) Oracle-supplied type can be used to store and query XML data in the database. XMLType has member functions you can use to access, extract, and query the XML data using XPath expressions. XPath is another standard developed by the W3C committee to traverse XML documents. Oracle XMLType functions support a subset of the W3C XPath expressions. Oracle also provides a set of SQL functions (including SYS_XMLGEN and SYS_XMLAGG) and PL/SQL packages (including DBMS_XMLGEN) to create XMLType values from existing relational or object relational data.

XMLType is a system-defined type, so you can use it as an argument of a function or as the datatype of a table or view column. When you create a XMLType column in a table, Oracle internally uses a CLOB to store the actual XML data associated with this column. As is true for all CLOB data, you can make updates only to the entire XML document. You can create an Oracle Text index or other function-based index on a XMLType column.

URI Datatypes

Oracle supplies a family of URI types--UriType, DBUriType, and HttpUriType--which are related by an inheritance hierarchy. UriType is an object type and the others are subtypes of UriType.

Using this model, you can reference data stored in CLOB columns or other columns and expose them as URLs to the external world. Oracle provides a standard URI servlet that can interpret such URLs. You can install and run this servlet under the Oracle Servlet engine.

UriFactoryType

UriFactoryType is a factory type, which is a type that can create and return other object types. When given a URL string, UriFactoryType can create instances of the various subtypes of the UriTypes. It analyzes the URL string, identifies the type of URL (HTTP, DBUri, and so on) and creates an instance of the subtype.

See:

 
Advanced Queueing (AQ) Features
Metadata API
Oracle Text (interMedia Text/Context) Features
Oracle9iAS Reports Services

XML Features Introduced with Oracle8i Release 3 (8.1.7)

New XML features introduced in Oracle8i, Release 3 (8.1.7) were enhanced and improved versions of the following components:


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