Chapter 15. Principles of Query Design
Well-designed, robust queries have the advantages of running faster and with fewer errors, as well as being easier to debug and maintain. This chapter describes some of the goals of query design, with particular attention to handling errors and tuning for performance.
Query Design Goals
Some of the elements of good query design include:
- Clarity
Queries that clearly convey their meaning are much easier to understand and therefore to maintain.
- Modularity
Expressions should be reusable in many parts of a query and across multiple queries.
- Robustness
Queries should be able to handle all possible combinations of values of input data.
- Error handling
Queries should handle dynamic errors gracefully, with useful messages.
- Performance
Queries should be tuned for performance.
The rest of this chapter takes a closer look at these design goals.
Get XQuery now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
