Making a fool of myself in 5 minutes or less

1. Making a fool of myself in 5 minutes or less Daniela Florescu Oracle Corp. BEA Systems XQRL Propel Crossgain INRIA

2. (Approximate) citations • “XQuery and the other W3C standards are too complicated. It’s impossible to work with them” • Surajit Chaudhuri, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Gerhard Weikum • “Relational databases have a query language, XML no” • Pat Helland • “XQuery is too complicated” • Dave DeWitt • “XQuery failed” • Michael Stonebraker Why do you all look at me ?

3. Coming out of the closet • I don’t like XML… • I hate namespaces… • I never managed to finish reading certain sections of XML Schema… • I don’t even like XQuery … • But: • Don’t get me started on technologies that I don’t like • I am not crazy enoughto believe thatthe world cares about what I like (or not)

4. The reality • “It’s a historical necessity !” • Lenin about the communism • Me about XML • XML := the name of a community of people that have lots of information (I.e. stuff that can be written down digitally) and don’t know what to do with it.

5. But still. • Give it a try… • If your head hurts, send email to • Don Chamberlin, • Mary Fernandez, • Jerome Simeon, • Michael Rys, • Michael Kay, • Phil Wadler, • Many, many others and they’ll bring you tea, and hold your hand in those difficult moments • Don’t get stuck with the ugly details, just look at what one can do with it ! You will be amazed.

6. The database field ” “a collection of models, tools and algorithms for data management that guarantee scalability” • Small editing corrections: “a collection of models, tools and algorithms for datamanagement that guarantee scalability In an ever changing environment” Change:data To: information Change:Mb -> Gb -> Tb To:scale to the level of the Web # of data feeds # of data models # of physical locations # of users Change: store, put, get To: management through the entire lifetime of the information One principle is indispensable for this goal declarativity

7. Declarativity and the real world • “Dissociate the logic of the processing from how and where the information is actually processed.” • My personal reality checks: • http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200412/threads.html • More then 150 answers in 2 days “Declarative systems don’t work. Programmers know better how to do memory allocation and parallelization by hand. They don’t buy your stuff.” X.Y@Z.com • We take declarativity for granted, and this might be a mistake.

8. What does XQuery has to do with this ? • Perfect or not, XQuery has an important role to play in the IT ecosystem Brings declarativity in information processing. • Is only a first and timid step in this direction. • If we miss this train, the next opportunity for declarativity in information processing will be in 15-20 years.

9. My “outrageous” claim • In 15-20 years from now: • Information will stay only in XML (no more tuples, no more objects) • Imperative languages as we know them today (Java, C, C++, C#) will be gone • We will program with some extension of XQuery, or in any case a declarative dataflow/workflow language specially designed for XML processing and SOA. • The sooner we go there the better.