Hunted by the endless vulnerabilities in its programs, Microsoft this Wednesday alerted for yet three more. The flaws affect IIS 4.0 and 5.0; Windows NT 4.0, 2000 and XP; and the Microsoft SQLXML. With two of them classified as Moderate and one as Critical, the software giant urges users once again to download the available patches.

There are two situations to consider when inserting rows into the Shippers table, which contains identity column (ShipperID):

Improve performance and gain convenience by using custom business objects serialized to and from XML rather than forcing your presentation-tier developers to work directly with DataSets.

Web services provide a standard way to build loosely coupled applications that are resilient to change, can be easily described using Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and will make you rich overnight.

Potentially damaging vulnerabilities have been found in Microsoft products ranging from its Internet Information Server (IIS), Remote Access Service and SQL Server 2000.

Once you install the SQL 2000 Web Services Toolkit (most importantly for this discussion, SQLXML 3.0) you will be able to communicate to SQL Server via HTTP by creating a SQL Virtual Root Directory from one of your selected databases.

Another way to create a SQLXML virtual directory is to use the IIS Virtual Directory Management for SQL Server object model.

This paper covers several techniques to improve the performance of queries against and modifications to the XML data type in the latest version of Microsoft? SQL Server?, SQL Server "Yukon." To get the most value from this paper, you should have some familiarity with XML features in the context of SQL Server.

SQL Server is an XML-enabled DBMS, which can read and write XML data, return data from databases in XML format, and read and update data stored in XML documents. In fact, SQL Server has eight different ways to use XML. Learn how each of them works, and how they interoperate.

So far, this series has concentrated on configuration options available via the graphical interface of IIS Virtual Directory Management for SQL Server. However, newer versions of SQLXML, in addition to the features we have already covered, provide another type of functionality, accessible through scripting, that allows bulk loading of XML data into SQL databases.

SQL/XML in JDBC Applications

If you've been working with SQL Server 2000, you're probably already familiar with the XML capabilities provided by the SQLXML technologies, a set of add-on libraries for SQL Server.

This document explores different approaches for creating XML structures from SQL queries by comparing SQL/XML to custom-coded solutions using JDBC and SAX or DOM and to proprietary XML extensions from the database vendors. Many Java applications exchange data as XML, but store and query data using a JDBC connection to a traditional relational database.

Let's define a schema with a recursive element as a schema in which one or more elements contain one or more instances of themselves, either directly or with intervening elements. Recursive elements let you represent relationships between similar items by nesting the XML tags. For example, you could design an organization chart in which each manager's Employee element contains the Employee elements of the staff members who report to that manager.

XML and databases seem to be a natural pair. But once you start to convert database data returned by your query component into XML formatted data, you will quickly find the process tiresome, even though you are using the latest and greatest Delphi 7 Enterprise. Wouldn’t it be easier to leave the task of XML conversions to the database itself? If you are using Microsoft SQL Server 2000, you can do just that!

For many years now, the SQL standard has been maintained and enhanced by NCITS Technical Committee H2 on Database in the US and by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC32/WG3 Database Languages Working Group internationally.

In my last article, Importing XML into SQL Server 2000, we looked at various techniques to import the XML data into SQL Server. To complement that, this article will focus on some of the methods that you can use to export relational SQL data to the XML format.

In a previous article of this series, I described using bulk loading of XML data with scripting interfaces included in the SQLXML version 2.0 and later. Now, we are going to explore another feature introduced in SQLXML version 2.0 (and enhanced in the version 3.0) called Diffgrams.

In the previous article, I explained the meaning of the "Allow posted updategrams" and "Allow template queries" options on the Settings tab of the Virtual Directory Properties dialog box in IIS Virtual Directory Management for SQL Server tool. I also presented examples of taking advantage of these options to return results of the T-SQL queries in the XML format via HTTP. In this article, I will continue discussion on this subject, focusing on the next option on the Settings tab - "Allow XPath".

If you've been working with SQL Server 2000, you're probably already familiar with the XML capabilities provided by the SQLXML technologies, a set of add-on libraries for SQL Server. With SQLXML installed, you can return the results of relational queries as XML fragments, use XPath to query your database, and so on.