Personally, I think all of the "new" ways of sharing data are just stupid. XML, JSON, EDI, whatever. It's all stupid. If it's not tag bloated hierarchical crap that does need to be, its some other junk the you need a 100 page spec to write the code to disassemble the garbage into normalized tables. I was really excited when XML first came out with the promise of "not having to know the structure of the data". Nothing could be further from the truth.
I think back to when I was using DB2 and DB3 ("DBF" files) for a short while. THAT was amazing. If someone want to me to have the data in 3 related tables, we wouldn't go through all this hierarchical XML junk. They would just send me 3 files that I could attach to a database and it was a done deal because the header of the file (the DB III structure) had the column names and the datatypes described in it and the rest of the rows were data. ASCII in all it's glory sans tag bloat, hierarchical nonsense, or having to be careful about special characters.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)