XQuery and XML DB Hands On Lab

There are a couple of key new features that Oracle were demonstrating in this lab. They are being cagey about when it will be released, but like a lot of this stuff, I would expect to see it in 11g, which is slated for release some time next year (2007).
First is the concept of indexes on unstructured XML data in XMLTYPE fields or tables. This means that you can quickly access data stored in XMLTYPEs without registering an XML schema first.
This will be a boon for anyone who wants to avoid the hassle of maintaining schema bound XMLTYPEs just to get the performance benefit they provide.
The second feature was the native Oracle web services. These really do seem to be very easy to implement and I can imagine this flourishing, or even proliferating as a way of accessing databases in a wide variety of systems.
The remainder of the lab was largely about XQuery, which apart from being a good way of accessing XML through XPath, is also a fairly complete programming language. It's being pushed as the 'XML-centric' way of accessing XML data in the database as opposed to the old 'SQL centric' way.
Incidentally, I hadn't realised that JDeveloper offers some really excellent tools for dealing with XML. I recommend taking a look at it even if you don't program in Java.