Ideally, this data type would come with some dedicated indexing structures, the way SQL Server has XML indexes, allowing faster queries against large volumes of JSON data.

Last month, Oracle unveiled Big Data SQL, a tool that can run a SQL query against Oracle’s data store, as well as Hadoop and NoSQL stores. The software is an option for the Big Data Appliance.

Sending a SQL query against remote, heterogeneous databases is just one of several ways to integrate data. Others include the following: ...

This class makes it very easy, almost trivial, to convert SQL query results into XML, but a major disadvantage of OracleXMLQuery is that it is a proprietary solution.