Hi Jacob,

glad you are writing these easy to use articles. Key point I've learned is that the FOR XML clause makes the stream work with ADO.NET's ExecuteXMLReader. One shortcoming I found the other day in trying to retrieve some XML stored in a Text column in SQL 2000 was the fact that the column was of type text. This does not work, according to MSDN:

i.ExecuteXmlReader only works with XML data.

ii.XML data is either : (a) XML text stored in a ntext or nvarchar field (b) an XML stream (i.e. a query with a FOR XML clause) or (c) SQL2K5 onwards XML data type.

Thought I'd mention that to try to prevent others wasting time like I did on that.