SQL Archives

XPath & XQuery Tutorial for SQL Pros (Video)

August 4, 2021/in SQL, XPath, XQuery /by Ty Shuff

Prior to starting at Altova I had zero experience with both XPath and XQuery. The first task I was presented with was to train myself on both query languages as quickly as possible and produce a concise video that would serve as an XPath tutorial and XQuery tutorial. It was important to develop a thorough understanding of their features and capabilities because both languages are integral to app development in MobileTogether and querying data in XMLSpy. I started with a strong background in SQL, learning XPath and XQuery by building queries first in SQL, and then determining how to replicate them in both query languages.

Data Mapping Binary Objects – Part 2

October 30, 2020/in Data Integration, Database mapping, SQL, Tools /by David McGahey

Binary objects – BLOBs — can be cumbersome to manage in databases. In an earlier post we described a MapForce data mapping to insert binary objects into a database with generated metadata to identify the BLOBs later. The companion challenge in data mapping binary objects is to extract binary data and save it in a comprehensible form faithful to the original.

Let’s look at how that’s done.

Data Mapping Binary Objects

October 21, 2020/1 Comment/in Data Integration, Database mapping, SQL, Tools /by David McGahey

Binary objects are difficult to manage in databases. They are large, their content is not human readable, and they can contain bytes of data easily misinterpreted as control characters. Even the data type name for binary large objects – BLOB – reflects most database managers’ dislike of them. Before relational databases, the definition of a blob was “something undefined or amorphous.”

Altova MapForce, the award-winning, graphical data mapping tool for any-to-any conversion and integration, includes features for effortlessly data mapping binary objects to or from all popular relational databases. Data such as images, PDF files, video files, or any other binary data can be mapped. Let’s look at an example.