XML and SQL: Developing Web Applications

Working with XML Documents

I've shown you how to turn relational data into XML data; now let's look at how you can turn XML data into relational data. SQL Server provides features for working with XML documents on the server and even for writing data from XML documents to the database. The OPENXML keyword and two system-stored procedures that I'll discuss provide a way to access XML documents within queries as if they were a standard relational table. However, as you'll discover, the syntax for accessing portions of an XML document is specialized.

OPENXML

Here's a simple example of how OPENXML is typically used. The example simply demonstrates how to query an XML document using a SQL SELECT query.

 DECLARE @hdlXmlDoc integer DECLARE @xmlText ...