Summary

This chapter presents the new XML and web services support introduced in SQL Server 2005. The new xml data type allows you to save XML documents and fragments into a relational database. This gives you a consistent way to save structured and unstructured data inside a relational database.

You can associate XSD schemas with an XML type column or variable to yield typed XML. For a typed XML column or variable, SQL Server makes sure that the XML content validates with the structure and type defined in the associated XSD document from the schema collection.

SQL Server 2005 partially implements the XQuery W3C specification to allow querying of XML data. You can create indexes based on XML type to improve the query response time. The XML DML extension to the XQuery specification allows you to update parts of XML data.

This chapter also presents an overview of improvements made to the FOR XML clause from SQL Server 2000.

The final section in this chapter introduces the concept of SOAP and web services and then shows how SQL Server 2005 natively supports mapping of stored procedures and functions to web service methods.

Chapter 11 presents details on another big developer productivity feature introduced in SQL Server 2005.NET integration with the SQL Server 2005 engine.