SQL Server 2005: What's New? - XML Data Type

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Standard SQL supports only simple scalar datatypes. XML, on the other hand, is capable of modeling any type of data. The XML datatype allows you to store XML in the database as a supported data type, as opposed to simply storing it as a string.

With the XML data type, you can query, validate, and modify the contents of an XML document in the CML data type. It "integrates traditional, relational data with data in unstructured or semi-structured XML documents in ways that are not possible with SQL Server 2000." I have to take issue with this because SQL is about data storage and retrieval. SQL is not about data processing, especially not XML processing. I'll talk of this more later in the article.

FOR XML and OPENXML Operators, XQuery Support

These allow you to operate on XML data in a tabular format in queries. If you intend to take advantage of the XML data type, you will need to be familiar with these. In combination with these you will use the XQuery support built into Yukon, taking advantage of the methods query(), exist(), value(), nodes(), and modify().

All together, these methods offer the core functionality of XQuery to find and return information from an XML document. Again, if you are a database purist - or more importantly a tiered architecture purist - you will not find yourself using these features often, but for quick and dirty XML solutions these features could be useful.

Next on the tour are the new management and security features. SQL Server made leaps and bounds from version 7.0 to version 2000 in terms of ease of administration, adding support for a wide variety of system notifications and tight integration with the operating systems logging and notification faculties. SQL Server 2005 offers some new management features with SQL Management Objects (SMO), which is the logical continuation of SQL-DMO. It also brings some enhancements to notification, mobile services and security, which I will cover in this area along with SMO.

Next: SQL Management Objects (SMO) >>
 

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