Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005

XML Data Type

SQL Server 2005 introduces a native XML datatype and substantially enhanced XML support. Earlier versions of SQL Server had some support for XML data, but not as a native type and with limited functionality. You can now store XML data, constrain it with XML schemas, index it with specialized XML indexes, and manipulate it using the XQuery language, which follows the W3C standard. XQuery manipulation includes querying (query method), retrieving values (value method), existence checks (exists method), modifying sections within the XML data (modify method) as opposed to overriding the whole thing, shredding XML data into multiple rows in a result set (nodes method), and more. In the following section, I’ll explain why you need the XML ...