The widespread adoption of XML has profoundly altered the way that information is exchanged within and between enterprises. XML, an extensible, text-based markup language, describes data in a way that is both hardware- and software-independent. As such, it has become a standard of choice for a growing number of Web services and Service Oriented Architectures. With a vast amount of data being published in XML format by multiple sources, the need has arisen for an easy and efficient means of extracting and manipulating this information. XQuery has emerged as an ideal way to aggregate data from Web services, relational databases, and other applications that employ XML.