Why would I ever choose to store and manipulate XML in a relational database?

Question

Modern RDBMS\'s have support for XML column types and functionality for dealing with XML in stored procedures. Historically I would always have mapped hierarchical data (whe

Answer 1

You can process XML data directly in SQL server. E.g. you can apply XPath expressions and just send the filtered result set to the client. SQL server features can build upon XML processing capabilities later.

The features above exist from MS SQL Server 2000 or 2005.