I'm a tad more proficient with BaseX, but, how do I actually build an XQuery? Yes, I can write an XQuery and save it in a text file, then use BaseX for execution. But it would be far more flexible to write the actual XQuery from within Java itself. But how? Oracle gives an example: OXQDataSource ds = new OXQDataSource(); XQConnection con = ds.getConnection(); String query = "<hello-world>{1 + 1}</hello-world>"; XQPreparedExpression expr = con.prepareExpression(query); XQSequence result = expr.executeQuery(); using their datasource. Cannot BaseX do something similar? see also: https://stackoverflow.com/q/53996575/262852 thanks, Thufir