Hugo Kornelis (7/29/2013)
I share your antipathy (or should I say hatred?) of XML and XQuery.
I think "dislike" is perhaps a better word than either of those. In the case of XML, I know that my dislike is irrational because it is based not on the XML definition but instead on all the horrible misuse of XML that has been caused by pundits who have hyped it beyond all reason as a panacea for everything.
But matter of fact is, it is a part of the product I work with, and it's my professional responsibility to ensure I have at least sufficient working knowledge to handle things if they come up.
When I was working full time, I shared that view; even now, I have enough knowledge that if I wanted to do a t-d d-f l-to-r data only scan of some XML in T-SQL I would know that @xml_thing.query('data(node)') was something that might do it, so I would know where to start looking.
Tom