If you are working with SQL Server 2005, you can not help but appreciate the incredible support for XML that has been incorporated. The current XML support really dwarfs anything seen before. You will definitely want to give this book a read. Between XQuery, the new XML data type, the enhancements to the "For XML" clause and the OpenXML function, the new options for developers are really tremendous.

For all the problems of interoperability solved by XML, it has created a whole series of new ones for SQL database developers, mostly centered around attempts to use an engine designed for flat relational data to process the hierarchical constructs of XML.

The next version of SQL Server will have a significant amount of functionality related to storing, querying and extracting XML from the database. To accompany the information being imparted at TechEd 2004, myself and rest of the folks behind the XML Developer Center on MSDN decided to run a series of articles on the XML features of SQL Server 2005. The articles will run through the month of June. The first article in the series is XML Support in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Read this article if you are interested in learning how SQL Server 2005 has become a fully XML-aware database including the addition of the XML datatype, support for XML Schemas, indexing of XML data, XQuery, querying XML views of relational data using XPath and much more.

You can create XML views of relational data by using the XML Schema Definition (XSD) language. These views can then be queried by using XML Path language (XPath) queries. (This is similar to creating views by using CREATE VIEW statements and then specifying SQL queries against the view.)

You can write a client application by using SOAP Toolkit 2.0 and then send SOAP requests to the server computer that is running Microsoft® SQLXML. SQLXML executes the requested stored procedure or template and returns a SOAP response to the SOAP Toolkit client as an IXMLDOMNodeList parameter.

With the Web reference mechanism in Microsoft® Visual Studio®, you can call stored procedures, user-defined functions (UDFs), and templates just as you would call any other method on an object in your application.

Microsoft® SQL Server 2000™ shipped more than a year ago with built-in support for storing and retrieving XML data. Knowing ongoing work would be required after the release of SQL Server 2000 in order to stay current with evolving W3C standards for XML, Microsoft began releasing fully-supported, XML feature packs to the Web in the months after the release of SQL Server 2000. Available as a free download, these XML feature packs—called SQLXML (XML for SQL Server)—extend the XML capabilities of SQL Server 2000.

Microsoft's SQLXML 3.0 is a powerful tool for rendering SQL Server 2000 relational data as structured XML documents within SOAP 1.1 response-message payloads. My earlier articles about SQLXML 3.0 emphasize generating document/literal XML Web services from existing stored procedures or table-returning functions (see Additional Resources).

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 shipped more than a year ago with built-in support for storing and retrieving XML data. Knowing ongoing work would be required after the release of SQL Server 2000 in order to stay current with evolving W3C standards for XML, Microsoft began releasing fully-supported, XML feature packs to the Web in the months after the release of SQL Server 2000. Available as a free download, these XML feature packs—called SQLXML (XML for SQL Server)—extend the XML capabilities of SQL Server 2000.

Note This document is based on the original spoken WebCast transcript. It has been edited for clarity.

The correct method of retreiving XML from SQL Server is to use either streams with an SQLOLEDB connection or HTTP through the SQLXML virtual directories. To see an example of using streams take a look at two examples on this site: VB Example and ASP Example. Query Analyzer does not do very well with XML resultsets so you're better off not using it to check your XML results. ODBC also does not work because the SQLOLEDB provider is needed to stream the XML results.

With the release of SQL Server 2000, a lot more support and functionality for XML was included in the product. In this article we would target at some of the out of the box functionality that SQL Server 2000 offers us to convert our relational data as XML formatted data. Not wasting much of the time lets get into the usage of these functionality into our application ...

Why not use commercial DB ?

SQLXML: XML Views and Relational Data

SQL Server 2000 XML Web Services, a.k.a. SQLXML. A part of SQL Server 2000, published by Microsoft.

SQLXML - XML Technology For SQL Server [ppt]

Don Box is looking for an “a ha” moment on why he should use SqlXml. Unfortunately, he probably won't find it while building his new Blog engine.

The forxmlschemaj function and the forxmlallj functions generate an XML schema that describes the SQLX-XML document for a specified result set.

The nwind virtual directory is used in most of the examples that illustrate URL access to Microsoft(r) SQL Server(tm) 2000.

This article provides an overview of XSD and an introduction to importing and exporting XML using SQL Server 2000.