I think the BULK INSERT statement is a good substitute to bcp. You avoid teh use of xp_cmdshell and also you avoid the overhead of having each field around tags. I personally think the best data interchange format is a pipe or comma delimited file. The question of portability doesn't arise as even with an XML file you still have to match the various tags. That said, XML does seem interesting and until now I haven't been convinced that it is the right format for transfer of large volume of data