Introduction

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, has met with immense popularity with the continually increasing need for dispersed systems to communicate in a growingly connected environment. Developed in 1996 and recorded by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1998, XML offers many advantages over complex and proprietary approaches to communication. True to its name of extensible, XML documents can be as simple as a single set of elements or as complex as necessary to accomplish nearly any task. Microsoft continues to make fundamental shifts in its technology architecture to support the processing, delivery, and use of XML, and many other organizations are quickly adopting it as an integral part of their solutions. With industry-standard support, extensible structure, and a low learning curve, XML will continue to increase its role and impact on technology solutions.

As one of the more publicized additions to SQL Server 2000, native XML support allows your organization to begin taking advantage of XML and prepare your applications for its increased use in the future. The addition of the FOR XML statement in T-SQL offers the straightforward delivery of XML-formatted result sets. Several new stored procedures are available for using XML documents as record sets in T-SQL. Client applications can take advantage of XML using the new extensions to ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) in version 2.6. SQL Server 2000 s support of HTTP access allows remote applications to retrieve and manipulate SQL Server data as XML over the Internet, with very little additional configuration.

This chapter...