XML and Data
XML has become a popular choice for the representation of data in applications. Before XML, almost all "serious" data in applications was held in a database of some form, usually a relational database. Developers became accustomed to dealing with data from relational databases in terms of the structure and relationships between tables (embodied in the schema of the database) and the SQL statements used to retrieve data from those tables.
If you consider that XML data also has a schema and a query mechanism (XPath), you can see that the two models have many similarities. In some cases, it is easier to manipulate and transport application data in terms of database artifacts, such as set of database records as embodied in an ADO.NET ...
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