Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

MSXML

SQL Server uses Microsoft's XML parser, MSXML, to load XML data, so we'll begin our discussion there. There are two basic ways to parse XML data using MSXML: using the Document Object Model (DOM) or using the Simple API for XML (SAX). Both DOM and SAX are W3C standards. The DOM method involves parsing the XML document and loading it into a tree structure in memory. The entire document is materialized and stored in memory when processed this way. An XML document parsed via DOM is known as a DOM document (or just “DOM” for short). XML parsers provide a variety of ways to manipulate DOM documents. Listing 18.1 shows a short Visual Basic app that demonstrates parsing an XML document via DOM and querying it for a particular node set. (You can ...