As Christoph Schittko and myself have pointed out XQuery is on its way here. And I believe to stay.
I’d like to state that XQuery will be the next big thing in Data Mining and your local file system. We will start to see quasi multi-dimensional XML in the form of aggregated XML documents. Think tuples. Already MDX constructs map very nicely to XML and there is already namespace support within XML. If you look at Members, Tuple (an intersection of 2 or more members) and Sets (A group of tuples or members) it’s pretty easy to see XPath expressions and namespaces.
E.g. Member - Employee.JohnDoe = <Employee:JohnDoe/>
E.g. Tuple - Customers.USA.Georgia = /Customers/USA[State=’Georgia’]
With XQuery and XPathNavigators querying Yukon and other objects (think file system) this is going to be very strong stuff. With Office 2003 and XML hiding behind the curtains you’ll be able to query not only Yukon (The Longhorn filestore?), XML documents and all of your files and spreadsheets. Put this together with some great new XML driven UI in Longhorn and there are going to be some very compelling Business Intelligence products from the folks at Redmond.
Sean