In rather stark contrast to what other folks have suggested about the use of XML to pass parameters, I usually wince at the thought. Because of "Tag Bloat", I concern myself with the extra I/O on all the systems and "pipes" from the end user to the database especially on systems that have a high hit rate. Because most people forget about it, I also concern myself with the need to de-entitize XML data for special characters and the fact that takes some bit of extra resources to accomplish.

Don't get me wrong. I think that CSV parameters are horrible even if proper CSV formatting is used instead of the formatting travesty that CSV has come to mean but if one does a comparison of methods using typical "simple" parameters, which consitute much of the parameter traffic, I'd rather use CSV because it causes much less traffic on the I/O systems across the board.

In case you're wondering, I'd like to see a return of the very sleek ASCII control characters to pass parameters with but no one will go there for multiple reasons... humans can't figure out what the "little square boxes" in Notepad mean and it's not likely that software providers will ever make such control character usage a standard because humans don't like to see such things as ^F_S, ^G_S, ^R_S, or ^U_S in their transmission text. And, yes, passing column meta-data would be just as easy.