bruce lee-206043 (8/25/2009)

Update SQL Server Data by Using XML Updategrams

An updategram is a data structure that you can use to express a change in the data. INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE commands are represented in an updategram by the difference of the image of the data before and the image of the data after a change.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316018%5B/quote%5D

Have you ever tried using it? I did and it performed badly on even a simple xml format(1 level elements with no more than 10 elements per row, closely resembling the underlying table's layout). For more complicated xml formats it is seriously slow (up to taking minutes to update a single record). We found that this is mostly due to the very complex (and huge) T-SQL statements it generates. The idea of being able to select, insert, delete and update all using the same 'meta model' defined in a single xsd, hiding the actual database layout from the application is very nice. But the implementation is far from usable as it is right now.