Thanks Matt. I agree and have come to the conclusion that those not agreeing with the article, or those otherwise opposed to using the relational engine in this fashion, would be the first to store XML, a blob, etc. in the database, but would rather have someone else's engine mask the data to binary. I am simply replacing someone's engine for doing this. This is the what they cannot comprehend or make sense out of. And, as far as I can remember, a binary data type is ANSI compliant regardless of who fashions the binary data which goes into it - a third-party program, .Net, or a programmer/db developer.