C H A P T E R 8
Working with XML
Beginning with SQL Server 2005, Microsoft added the XML data type, the XQuery language, and several new functions for working with XML data. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and it looks a lot like HTML except that it generally contains data. Companies often use XML to exchange data between incompatible systems or with their vendors and customers. SQL Server also extensively uses XML data to store query plans.
Fully covering XML support in SQL Server would take another complete book, so I’ll just briefly discuss it here. In the past, to work with XML, databases stored the XML data in TEXT columns. The database was just a storage place for the XML data. There was nothing to validate the XML data or ...
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