When you need to shred just part of the data within a large XML file into a SQL Server table, the most efficient way is to just select what you need via XQuery or by using XPath, before shredding it into a table. But precisely how would you do that?
2013-03-28
3,174 reads
2013-03-15 (first published: 2013-02-21)
7,790 reads
When the average database developer is obliged to manipulate XML, either shredding it into relational format, or creating it from SQL, it is often done 'at arms length'. A shame, since effective use of techniques that go beyond the basics can save much code,
2012-11-01
3,886 reads
XML Indexes make a huge difference to the speed of XML queries, as Seth Delconte explains; and demonstrates by running queries against half a million XML employee records. The execution time of a query is reduced from two seconds to being too quick to measure, purely by creating the right type of secondary index for the query.
2012-10-25
2,575 reads
2012-08-01
2,129 reads
This article demonstrates how to build an SSIS package that generates an XML invoice document from data stored in SQL Server and saves it to an XML file.
2012-03-28
4,886 reads
This SSIS package performs multiple XSL transformations on an XML document, then shreds the transformed document and inserts its data into a SQL Server table.
2012-03-21
3,879 reads
In Part 2 of this series we will shred an XML document and insert its records into a SQL Server table using both the OpenXML and XQuery methods.
2012-03-14
18,181 reads
This article demonstrates how to generate an XML stream from SQL Server using the 'FOR XML PATH' statement, and how to explore that XML stream interactively using an XSL transformation.
2012-03-07
7,973 reads
In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.
2012-02-07
4,207 reads
Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...
By Steve Jones
One of the features we advocates have been advocating for is a better way...
Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years of SQL Server...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Decoded Value
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition...
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:
DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!'; DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX); SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000))); SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded)See possible answers