XSL Transforms in the database

Previously, I wrote on how to extract XPath refs from an arbitrary XML document. Well, you can actually do this inside a database too - specifically Oracle 9i/10g with built-in XMLDB support.

Say we have XML data and XSL templates stored in a simple table:

CREATE TABLE x1 (item varchar(25) primary key, xml xmltype);

Where the data is stored with item="data", and the XSL template to extract paths to text is stored as item="xsl-to-text", then our transform may be executed as simply as this:

select 
  XMLTransform(
    xml, 
    (select xml from x1 where item='xsl-to-text')
  ).getstringval() into v_out_text
from x1 where item='data'; 
dbms_output.put_line(v_out_text);

A full sample script is available here.