Chapter 6. XML and the Relational Database

Leonard Lobel

Ever since it exploded on the world scene in 1998, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has served (and continues to serve) as the de facto text-based standard for exchanging information between different systems and across the Internet. XML is a markup language (derived from SGML) for documents that contain semi-structured hierarchical information. In XML, data is organized as a tree of parent and child nodes, which is quite different than the way data is structured in the tables and columns of a traditional relational database. The emerging relevance of this markup format first inspired the database to support XML in Microsoft SQL Server 2000, which was capable of reading XML into tables using ...

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