Thanks Eirikur

I basically get 3 tables that are fed from our source system and have no control over these

all_rating_notes contains an attribute (full_description) that is actually varchar(max) when it's written to our staging database

I control manipulation from here i.e. create the production tables via SSIS

Are you suggesting another approach?

I suppose (providing a problem rather than a solution), I am trying to take some data and pivot that data out such that it becomes a number of attributes within a table

Part of that data happens to be an XML column

Thanks