I think the purpose of the stringbuilder was to just get the XML output to visually compare that you can indeed read it. In practice you wouldn't use the stringbuilder.

I don't yet have the luxury of coding everything in .NET but is there a case where it might be more efficient to return something like a order, order details, part details, etc tables as correctly nested XML rather than as separate recordsets that are then put into a dataset? I expect the answer to be "it depends on how you want to use the data" but if anyone has some concrete experience I'd be interested to know.

Personally I'm not a big fan of XML, not because I'm against it, but merely because if I don't need to use it (eg populating the dataset above rather than having an XMLDocument) and don't gain anything I don't feel like going to the extra effort 🙂