As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, SQL Server allows you to store data in tables, in a native XML format, using the XML data type. Like other large object types, it can store up to a maximum of 2GB per tuple. Although standard operators such as = and LIKE can be used against XML columns, you also have the option of using XQuery expressions (discussed in this chapter). They can be rather inefficient, however, unless you create XML indexes.
XML indexes will outperform full-text indexes for most queries against XML columns. SQL Server offers support for primary XML indexes and three types of secondary ...
