Hi Everyone! Hi Rob!
I have been working through some of the exercises in the XML chapter and they are very very good. Thanks for all of the details, notes and comments you added, plus really easy to understand code.

I know that you can use a FOR XML to direct a query output to XML, but is there a way to setup SQL Server 2008 so the query results are in XML? For the default? I cannot figure out the steps on how to setup SQL server so the query results are in XML, and have also searched online a dozen ways to figure this out.

I can create XML output from a query using the examples but I want to actually setup SQL to do this.

Thanks for any advice you might be able to offer! This one is stumping me.
Have a great day and weekend!

Ann Ziluck

Aspiring SQL ASP and VS geek, full time online student, IT Manager, former AS/400 guru :)

As I understand it, XML is a data communication language, and does not have a system for storage and retrieval. To do this in SQL, you should create a SPROC that matches the XML and call it from your queries with parameters to match the elements and attributes you are looking for within the XML data you have stored in SQL Server. The way SQL Server stores and handles XML data is pretty complicated, which is why using SPROCs to handle the application programming interface (API) for accessing and manipulating it is the best practice for getting XML out of the system.

By providing your users with the necessary SPROCs, you will effectively remove the barrier for them to get to the XML by giving them an SQL friendly interface to the create, read, update, delete (CRUD) routines. You can produce a SPROC for ever table that stores XML data so that rows can be worked on as though they were entirely standard scalar data values. I think some of the confusion comes from the way that XML stores data is a potentially deep hierarchy of what we would know as columns in SQL. Combining those two paradigms is tough, so using a SPROC that is designed to work with the XML which is essentially hanging off the edge of the table row by a pointer will solve most any problems with getting XML from the SQL Server database in XML format.