This talk explains and demonstrates Oracle9i Release 2, our new database version with major new high-performance, native database support for XML. Key new features that will be covered include:

-> Single database engine supporting all existing datatypes (relational, SQL99 objects, data warehousing, geospatial, time-series, multimedia, etc.) integrated with a *new* native XMLType...all sharing a common SQL query language (extended for XML), common maintenance, transactions, backup/recovery, etc.

-> Support for forthcoming ISO SQLX standard extensions to SQL for constructing XML in SQL including the operators XMLElement(), XMLAttributes(), XMLForest(), XMLAgg(), and XMLConcat()

-> Full W3C XML Schema 1.0, XPath 1.0, XSLT 1.0, and DOM Core support for native XMLType datatype implemented deep inside the engine and exposed to SQL, PL/SQL and Java API's. Users can augment built-in processing of XML documents with stored procedures, functions, and triggers as for any other types and tables.

-> Automatic Object/Relational Storage for XML documents based on XML Schema, with optional fine-tuning of the mapping via Schema Annotations (already supported in XML Spy 4.3 tool). Includes optional support for full DOM fidelity and mixed content storage.

-> SQL extensions for XPath-based extract(), extractValue(), existsNode(), and updateXML() operators for manipulating documents, including the ability to rewrite a subset of XPath expressions to use underlying object/relational indices and full-text indices for maximum performance.