Hi Jeff.

Thanks for your comments. I totally agree with you regarding how expensive these types of queries are. For sure, the query I posted could be fine tuned, but it will still be much much more expensive then using a flat file for example. If any XML data is as flat as it is in the example, then XML isn't the best option to carry that data.

It does seem that to move data around these days, XML seems to be the default choice. Probably in part being driven by middle tier/app developers rather than DBA/Developers as you can serialize huge chunks of data to an xml file in about 5 lines of code (or less!). Give me flat files to import any day!