Using XML in the database

Extensible Markup Language (XML) represents structured data in text format. XML was designed specifically to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing.

XML is a simple markup language, like HTML, but is also flexible, like SGML. XML is hierarchical, and its main purpose is to describe the structure of data for both humans and computer software to author and read.

Rather than providing a static set of elements which describe various forms of data, XML lets you define elements. As a result, many types of structured data can be described with XML. XML documents can optionally use a document type definition (DTD) or XML schema to define the structure, elements, and attributes that are used in an XML file.

There are several ways you can use XML with SQL Anywhere:

For more details about XML, see [external link] http://www.w3.org/XML/.


Storing XML documents in relational databases
Exporting relational data as XML
Importing XML documents as relational data
Obtaining query results as XML
Using SQL/XML to obtain query results as XML