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Difference Between XQuery and XPath

Last Updated : 24 Dec, 2024
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XQuery is a powerful and versatile language designed for querying and interacting with XML datasets. Its primary purpose is to retrieve, manipulate, and transform data stored in XML format. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XQuery became a W3C Recommendation in 2007.

XPath is basically a track declaration used in deriving results which are in the form of string or boolean values, these values are actually the location of data files that are used in computation hence it is considered as a path driven language used for interacting with XML data.

Note: 3- XPath does operate on a tree model representation of XML documents, but this is not exclusive to XPath.

Differences Between XQuery and XPath:

XQuery

XPath

XQuery is an active programming language which is used to interact with XML data groups. XPath is a language used to navigate and select nodes from XML documents.
XQuery is case sensitive so when interacting with XML dataset it follows the case-sensitivity policy. XPath is case-sensitive for element and attribute names.
A tree model, as well as a tabular model, are used in XQuery for data retrieval. Tree model representation is being used in XPath. 
It was not a W3C standard until 2014. It follows the standards given by W3C.
XQuery is efficient as it aids Xpath. It is just the element of the query language 
Operators used in XQuery are union, except, intersect etc. Operators used in XPath are union and OR.
Sort and Projection are allowed in Xquery. Sort and Projection functionalities are not allowed.
Both inbuilt and user-defined functions are allowed. Only inbuilt library functions are allowed.
It consumes more storage due to larger payloads. It does not consume more storage.


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