Defining XML Views

If you need to extract data from your SQL Server database in a specific XML vocabulary, XML views are a good technology to choose. By XML vocabulary, I mean XML that corresponds to an agreed-upon formatting of the elements and attributes that make up an XML document. You define the vocabulary by building an XML Schema Definition (XSD) schema or using a prebuilt schema. You construct XML views by adding annotations (additional elements and attributes that locate data within your relational database) to any standard XSD schema. The annotations define the mapping between the XML and your relational database's schema. You can think of the resulting XML view as a virtual XML document that contains the data stored in your database. SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000 Web Release 3 (SQLXML) support a variety of annotations for mapping data stored in SQL Server into an instance of an XML document that the schema describes.

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