I've done a bit with the FOR XML stuff in SQL Server 2000, but honestly gave up when it came to EXPLICIT. It just seemed like too much work....

I just thought I should mention that Books Online actually has downloadable updates, with a HUGE percentage of the content having been updated. Highly recommended that all users do...

Honestly, I'm not sure what his specific "degradation" is. I was hoping to discuss more general concepts in the thread, but general never seems to work, because performance depends...

Typically the fields joined would be INTs, perhaps with a sporadic varchar(32) thrown in. I would say an average table's width would be around...500 bytes. Do the indexes...