• I'm putting this in a separate post so it doesn't get buried.

    For those of you who have conducted tests for various ways to do this......this article could be the reason you got mixed results.

    PLEASE be aware of this performance issue with element based xml:

    http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/250407/insert-from-nodes-with-element-based-xml-has-poor-performance-on-sp2-with-x64

    (Thanks Erland for finding it)

    I actually convert my element based xml to attribute based xml before sending to sql server if using sql server 2005.

    ...I haven't done many 2008 tests to see if the issue was actually ever resolved. Erland makes a few comments at the post.