I found the articles and discussion interesting.

I have built a web based content management system where the page content is stored in XML representation in one field.

I did this because it is easy to change the data structure as needed, and each row can have a different XML structure if necessary.

The down sides to this are:

• that the content for each page must be less than 8k (not really a problem as greater than 8k would really be too much!)
• XML markup is mingled with content and thus performing a search may pick up matches in the markup.

What I would prefer to do is to have each structure stored in its own table, with markup elements one per field.

However, when reading the data out for display this would require something like:

select @table from pages where pageid = @pageid

select * from @table where pageid = @pageid

As far as I can tell, the solution advocated in these articles would go something like:

select @table from pages where pageid = @pageid

if @table = 'structure1'

begin

select * from structure1 where pageid = @pageid

end

if @table = 'structure2'

begin

select * from structure2 where pageid = @pageid

end

etc.

This is certainly harder to maintain than the dynamic SQL alternative.

Is there a better way, or is dynamic SQL a 'satisfactory' approach?

BTW I already have to use dynamic SQL for our distributed queries on to Oracle!