I appreciate this article and thank you for writing it. In my current job they store XML data in several databases. The curious thing, to me, is that the XML data is never stored as XML data. It is always stored as either a large NVARCHAR or maybe NVARCHAR(MAX). I do not know why. In some cases I imagine it was done before SQL Server supported the XML data format. But I know that's not true in other cases. In other cases they're creating new databases with XML data, but still storing it as NVARCHAR. Anyway, thank you for this article, as it helps me understand how XML probably should be handled in SQL Server.