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 store user generated XML in there.

If a website like stackoverflow used some sort of XML markup instead of mark down you could store the question/answers as XML in the database. You might find yourself trying to parse this user generated XML looking for proprietary tags.