Conclusion

You can see that there is no single right answer to the question of where to store your data. However, Microsoft has made significant improvements in the database engine so that you can store more types of data more efficiently. If you need to store XML data, you should seriously consider using the new built in XML datatype because of the functionality it offers. SQL Server can also handle other types of application files that you may need for tracking application data, incuding settings files. You should be able to use what you have learned in this chapter to make sound decisions on data-storage locations when designing your application.

Chapter 1 Quick Reference

To	Do this
Start SQL Server Management Studio	From the Start Menu, select All Programs | Microsoft SQL Server 2005 | SQL Server Management Studio.
Enter and execute a new query in SQL Server Management Studio	Click the New Query button, type your query in the query pane, and click the Execute button.
View XML data for a row returned by a query	Click the link in the Results pane below the query window.
Use the XQuery query() method to return data stored in the SampleXML variable	Use the T-SQL statement SELECT @SampleXML.query('/root/L1/L2)')