PASS Community Summit 2008: Program Sessions (Database Administration)

The introduction of the native XML datatype in SQL Server opened up many possibilities for how we manage the data in our databases. It also struck terror in the hearts of some DBAs. When does it make sense to store data as XML in a SQL Server database? What are the potential problems with doing so? This session will analyze a real-life example of a project that was successfully implemented using the XML datatype as the foundation of the database design. This project was executed on a database that was already in production and had millions of users whose data needed to be preserved. The session will examine the database design and explore details of the implementation, including XML schema validation and utilization of XML data type methods. It will explain how collaboration between the DBA and application developers was crucial to the project's success. The complex process of converting millions of relational rows into XML documents will be reviewed. Finally, the session will describe how the inclusion of XML actually reduced the size and improved the performance and maintenance of a busy production database.

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