Thread: future development of xml capabilities

Hello Postgres Gurus,

I am doing some research regarding the postgres native xml type, I found that the xml type can not be indexed, I found some work arounds for it but, I was wondering if there were any plans to implement indexing on a xpath expression in future releases on Postges like Postgres 9?

Thank you,

Sncerely,

Kasia

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------8.3 has integrated xpath function. There is gap in XML support, because XML type isn't supported with GIST or GIN index. So xpath function returns array of xml values. But we can write custom casting to int array:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION xml_list_to_int(xml[])

RETURNS int[] AS $$

SELECT ARRAY(SELECT to_number(($1[i])::text,'999999.99')::int

                FROM generate_series(1, array_upper($1,1)) g(i))

$$ LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE;

CREATE CAST (xml[] AS int[]) WITH FUNCTION xml_list_to_int(xml[]);

-- array of integers are supported with GIST

CREATE INDEX fx ON foo USING

GIN((xpath('//id/text()',order_in_xml)::int[]));

8.13.3. Accessing XML Values

The xml data type is unusual in that it does not provide any comparison operators. This is because there is no well-defined and universally useful comparison algorithm for XML data. One consequence of this is that you cannot retrieve rows by comparing an xml column against a search value. XML values should therefore typically be accompanied by a separate key field such as an ID. An alternative solution for comparing XML values is to convert them to character strings first, but note that character string comparison has little to do with a useful XML comparison method.

Since there are no comparison operators for the xml data type, it is not possible to create an index directly on a column of this type. If speedy searches in XML data are desired, possible workarounds include casting the expression to a character string type and indexing that, or indexing an XPath expression. Of course, the actual query would have to be adjusted to search by the indexed expression.

The text-search functionality in PostgreSQL can also be used to speed up full-document searches of XML data. The necessary preprocessing support is, however, not yet available in the PostgreSQL distribution.