I am trying to install zorba xquery on a redhat santiago installation over ssh, not going good.
I am unfortunately not very familiar with redhat so I am having trouble getting things working, the list of rpms I have found are these http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=zorba
Whenever I tried to install one of them I got a bunch of missing dependencies, even if I install one of the dependencies it still shows up as missing when I try to install zorba again. I don't really understand redhat versioning of their OS, but looking around it seems Santiago was in 2010? And all these versions the RPMs are for are later? Is that the problem?
If so, any guides on installing zorba xquery on redhat santiago?
I can't provide a canonical answer as I don't use Red Hat myself. However, Santiago is a release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the supported form of Red Hat. The rpms you found at that link are, based on the version numbers (eg. "fc19"), intended for use on Fedora Linux, which is a community-developed release. So there is no guarantee that the dependencies will match up with packages available in Santiago.
From Wikipedia, it seems that RHEL releases are branched from Fedora releases originally. Based on the release date of Santiago, it would have been branched from FC 15 or so. So it's at least possible that you'll have better luck with the Zorba 2.1 packages, as they have 'fc15' in their versions. Zorba 2.1 is of course fairly old now, so this isn't an ideal solution even if it happens to work.
Your best bet will likely be to compile Zorba from source.