Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

Chapter 16. XML Integration

Extensible Markup Language (XML) — looking back at its history is something of a funny thing to me. Part of its strength lies in its simplicity, so it would seem like it wouldn't change much. Indeed, the basic rules of it haven't changed at all — but all the things surrounding XML (such as how to access data stored in XML) have gone through many changes. Likewise, the way that SQL Server supports XML has seen some fairly big changes from the time it was first introduced to the relatively massive support seen in SQL Server 2005.

So, to continue my "it's a funny thing" observation, I realize that as recently as when I did the Beginning edition for SQL Server 2005 I referred to XML support as being an "extra" — what a truly silly thing for me to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah — I've tempered that "extra" comment with the notion that it's only because XML support isn't really required to have a working SQL Server, but I've come to realize in today's world that it isn't much of a working SQL Server without support for XML. Indeed, as we continue through the rest of what I have generally referred to as "extras" in the past (Reporting Services, Integration Services, Connectivity and more), you'll see that even SQL Server stores many of the definition objects for these extra services using XML!

So, with all that said, in this chapter we'll look at:

• The XML data type

• XML schema collections

• Methods of representing your relational data as XML

• Methods of querying data that ...