A native XML datatype (not proprietary! XML is part of the SQL-2003
standard) offers better processing than manual shredding for the general
XML document case for subtree querying and provides certain model
consistency constraints. If you use XML as a transport format for
relational data, you should deal with the data inside the database
relationally and shred it back into relations. If you really only want
to store and forward the whole XML document, using a BLOB (not CLOB due
to encoding/codepage issues) is the most efficient way. But you loose
any guarantees (or have to guarantee it using different mechanisms) that
the data really is XML.

Best regards
Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tatu Saloranta [mailto:cowtowncoder@y...]
> Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 4:40 PM
> To: xml-dev
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] hierarchical XML in a relational DB structure -
> moving nodes
> 
> --- Michael Rys <mrys@m...> wrote:
> ...
> > 2. Don't need frequent independent access at
> > individual item level or
> > order in the tree is important:
> >
> > Use an XML datatype (like Oracle, SQL Server or
> > other databases
> > provide).
> 
> In this latter case, chances are that storing and
> accessing them as LOBs is about as efficient as using
> proprietary datatypes? Or are there special tricks db
> drivers can do to compress data in flight or
> something?
> I have always wondered what are the benefits of XML
> extensions for cases where the whole documents are
> returned (as opposed to using XQuery etc. to do parts
> of actual processing in the server side).
> 
> -+ Tatu +-
> 
> 
> 
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