Difference between compiler.source-path path-element="" / & source-path path-element="" /

Question

Hi guys,
I am not able to understand few differences when i am trying to compile my flex project using ANT. In the adobe resource i can see lots of places they mention as "compiler.source-path path-element="" "
And lots of places i use as <source-path path-element="" />. Can anybody give a better explaination about this.
The below example you can see there are lot of places where they used the attribute as compiler. & some places direct name
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- myMXMLCBuild.xml -->
<project name="My App Builder" basedir=".">
    <taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" classpath="${basedir}/flexTasks/lib/flexTasks.jar" />
    <property name="FLEX_HOME" value="C:/flex/sdk"/>
    <property name="APP_ROOT" value="apps"/>
    <property name="DEPLOY_DIR" value="c:/jrun4/servers/default/default-war"/>
    <target name="main">
        <mxmlc
            file="${APP_ROOT}/Main.mxml"
            output="${DEPLOY_DIR}/Main.swf"
            actionscript-file-encoding="UTF-8"
            keep-generated-actionscript="true"
            incremental="true"
        >
            <!-- Get default compiler options. -->
            <load-config filename="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks/flex-config.xml"/>
            <!-- List of path elements that form the roots of ActionScript
            class hierarchies. -->
            <source-path path-element="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks"/>
            <!-- List of SWC files or directories that contain SWC files. -->
            <compiler.library-path dir="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks" append="true">
                <include name="libs" />
                <include name="../bundles/{locale}" />
            </compiler.library-path>
            <!-- Set size of output SWF file. -->
            <default-size width="500" height="600" />
        </mxmlc>
    </target>
    <target name="clean">
        <delete dir="${APP_ROOT}/generated"/>
        <delete>
            <fileset dir="${DEPLOY_DIR}" includes="Main.swf"/>
        </delete>
    </target>
</project>

Answer 1

I know that Oracle has been putting work into improving the performance of XMLTable and XQuery and that is their direction for what we as developers should be using in our code. I've yet to write any production code like your query 2 but I agree with you that they should be equivalent. For a quick and dirty test, you could simply do an explain plan on both queries and see if they come out similar. As always, an explain plan does not mean that is exactly what Oracle will run during execution, but it is close enough for most situations.