I would like to know if there is a way to get XPath (or similar XML query language) access to a relational model.

I have some very large XML configuration files for a legacy application that I would like to persist relationally and then access as XML (for an interim migration step). The application itself currently uses XPath for accessing the data.

I just noticed that Hibernate 3 has some support for getting persisted relational data as a DOM tree.

Unfortunately (for me) the only way to query this seems to be using HQL and/or Criteria searches.

I've read the documentation and looked at the API and, either I'm just not looking in the right place or there doesn't seem to be a way to do this. To me it seems like the next logical step.

I was just wondering if there are plans to (or if you can already) use XPath or something similar to query the DOM instead?

Cheers,
Andy