I have been trying to leave comments on some XML specific issues through the fields at the bottom of the pages in the documentation of Oracle 11g R2, but it never works. I am logged in and the system always asks me to login and redirects me to a 404! So here are some comments (bug reports according to me).
Consider the following and you will see that UPDATEXML does not behave correctly with regard to attribute nodes:
SELECT UPDATEXML(XMLTYPE('<x><y u="aaa" v="bbb" /><y u="ccc" v="ddd" /></x>'), '//y[1]/@v', XMLTYPE('<a b="abc"/>').extract('//@b'))FROM dual
There may be a problem with how attribute nodes are represented by the XMLTYPE, but even then, the behaviour of the above is not defendable
Then we have the XMLSERIALIZE function that according to the documentation should create the XML declaration if the VERSION keyword is used. That does not work. Either the documentation is wrong, or there is a bug. XMLROOT still works, but since it is deprecated, XMLSERIALIZE should be fixed.
/nikos