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Higher-order transformations are ubiquitous within data management. In relational databases, higher-order queries appear in numerous aspects including query rewriting and query specification. In XML databases, higher-order functions are natural due to the close connection of XML query languages with functional programming. We investigate higher-order query languages that combine higher- order transformations with ordinary database query languages. We define higher-order query languages based on Relational Algebra and XQuery. We also study basic problems for these query languages including evaluation, containment, and type inference. We show that even though evaluating these higher-order query languages is non-elementary, there are subclasses that are polynomially reducible to evaluation for ordinary query languages.