In this article, Rick Dobson gives you a quick and useful intro to using XML templates. As you read it, you may also want to read or re-read Rick's January 2004 article on using the Web Services Toolkit to create Web Services and their clients, Tom Moreau's March 2001 column on feeding XML to stored procedures, and the late Anton Britten's February 2002 article on "getting the XML back in."

PL/SQL is commonly used to create a connection to a database, generate tables, retrieve result sets, and perform updates. The result set from a SQL query with PL/SQL, of course, is a text table. With the increasing use of XML in J2EE applications, many J2EE developers now require this result to be represented as an XML document for exchange of data.

April 8th and 9th 2001 saw the first conference dedicated to XSLT take place at Keble College in Oxford. While the basis of the conference was XSLT, this didn't stop people talking about the XSL effort in general or about other vocabularies and technologies that work with or against XSLT.

Although most of Oracle's XML functionality is handled through the XSQLServlet and its associated tools, the servlet itself is actually just one component of a full Java library for using XML with an Oracle database. Many of the tasks you would perform using the XSQLServlet can also be performed in Java using the oracle.xml.xsql package. This package contains a wealth of classes and methods to perform almost any task using XML and Oracle.

To connect your XSQL Servlet to your database you must create a database connection in the XSQLConfig.xml file. This file is located in C:\oracle\ora90\xdk\admin\XSQLConfig.xml (this path may vary depending on where you install your Oracle9i database). To set up your database connection you must edit the tag, located approximately three quarters of the way down the file. Your tag should look similar to the following:

The ability to transfer information from one database to another is vital to DBAs. XSQL provides a way to easily transfer stored information, by generating SQL INSERT statements.