Thank you for exploring an approach that I hadn't considered. I actually advised a colleague this month that there isn't a practical way to send bulk rows to SQL Server 2005 - he had around 100 rows to put in. But I'm particularly excited about the XML approach.

We have a 3-tier application design (rhymes with "beer"), with desktop and a server both running Java application code, as well as some 2-tier where there's just a desktop program (SQL Server is the other tier). The server is right next to the SQL Server on a fast server-room network (could even be blades), and I assume that just submitting a series of INSERT... VALUES (...) statements, with or without parameterization of the statement, is almost the best we can do. BCP and BULK INSERT won't really do, although I suppose we could do those from our Java server.

The great trap that I see with delimited data is where you want to use a delimiter character as a character in a data field. Again, XML, which is really just a sophisticated form of delimited data, comes with tools to handle that.