http://www.soamag.com The SOA Magazine is a monthly online publication provided by SOA Systems Inc. and Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR and is officially associated with the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl." SOA en-us Copyright 2006-2007, SOA Systems Inc. http://www.soamag.com/I10/0907-3.asp The fundamental goal of SOA is to facilitate business-level software modularity and allow for rapid reuse of application and data logic, enabling the enterprise to be responsive and agile. The XQuery language has become an integral technology for connecting heterogeneous data sources within service-oriented solutions. It's a natural fit for the typical XML data interchange format used in most SOA implementations and it provides powerful, cross-repository data access features without compromising scalability or performance. This article explores how the XQuery feature-set can be leveraged in support of SOA. (First published in The SOA Magazine Issue X, September 2007.) SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-cinnocenti.asp#When:03.09.07