In June, the World Wide Web Consortiums XML Query Working Group released a set of draft proposals for how a new XML query language, called XQuery, will work at the groups site (www.w3.org/XML/Query).
In the middle of this month, Microsoft released a test implementation of XQuery for XML developers. The Microsoft site (131.107.228.20/xquerydemo) shows XQuery in action and provides a set of code libraries that users of the companys .Net Beta 2 software development kit can download.
XQuery is somewhat like the relational database query language SQL (including features like relational joins) but also contains some procedural extensions common in SQL language extensions such as Oracle PL/SQL or Microsoft and Sybases Transact-SQL.
XQuery relies on previous XML standards such as XML Schema (for data types) and XPath (to locate XML elements).