Summary

The main point of this chapter was to demonstrate how to use the OpenXML function to insert data from an XML document into tables in a database. This is the primary purpose of this function, and it can be a crucial aspect of an integration solution in which XML documents are received and need to be logged in a database.

A secondary use of the OpenXML function is to retrieve metadata from an XML document, which can be useful if you intend to write your own XML processing logic. This is certainly not a trivial task, however, and you can find many off-the-shelf tools and utilities to do this kind of work for you.

In the next chapter, we’ll examine two alternative approaches to inserting XML data: updategrams and the XML bulk load component.