Why bother with the database at all then? Just store the XML directly on the disk? 😀

Seriously though, in today's day and age physical space is not usually an issue.

And, if you are going to be querying the data often, you will get better performance from a relational model.

The example with Candidates and Tests hit close to home.

We have a similar scenario and the original decision (made years ago) was to store the data as XML, for some of the reasons mentioned in the article.

But -- guess what? -- querying the data became slower and slower...

Eventually we had to write an APP that breaks the XML back into relational tables. :w00t: