SQL Server is more than capable of working with XML data. Since the 2005 version, it's actually one of the supported data types, which allows you to store up to 2 GB of XML content per record. When you type a query for SQL Server, the query returns data as a rowset—set of rows and columns. But you can retrieve all the data as an XML document too. You can add a special clause to the query, FOR XML, which will render the result as an XML document instead of the result set.
When you would like to create a XML document as a result of your query, you can use four different modes to render the XML file. These are as follows:
- Auto
- Path
- Explicit
- Raw
The raw mode will just generate an element representing a row from the result set. In this mode, each line will be used to build an element named <row>, with attributes representing the columns from...
