Chapter 11. SQL Server XML frequently asked questions
With the SQL Server 2005 release, Microsoft implemented new and exciting XML integration into SQL Server. These features include the following:
- A new native xml data type
- XML content indexing
- Improvements to the FOR XML clause
- Improvements to the OPENROWSET function
- Integrated support for XML Schema
- Native XQuery (XML Query Language) support
- Access to additional XML-specific functionality via SQL CLR integration
All of this functionality, with some additional improvements, is included in SQL Server 2008. Many developers have questions about how to take advantage of this new functionality. This chapter is structured in a frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) format, and will answer many of the most common questions raised by developers who want to use SQL Server–based XML functionality in their applications. We will start with the basics.
XML introduces a lot of terminology and concepts that can be new and confusing to SQL developers, or developers coming from other languages. In this section we will discuss some of these basic concepts.
