I really enjoy these XML workshops.

Of course, the parsing of delimited data is an important issue for data feeds. If data can be converted into XML first, using AWK or GREP or whatever, it then becomes much easier to gulp it into SQL Server. The biggest questions I've had are:

performance. Whenever I've used this XML technology for data feeds, or passing data between routines, it has been very fast, but others using a very similar system have reported it as being very slow. I'm not at all sure why the difference.

Resilience Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've had many feeds to deal with that occasionally spit out data that crashes the simplest, and most obvious, data import systems. I reckon that the best systems can isolate corrupt or incorrect data before the bulk insert and allow inspection of it by the DBA

Any thoughts?