Best way to transfer an xml to SQL Server? - sql-server

Question

I have been hearing the podcast blog for a while, I hope I dont break this.
The question is this: I have to insert an xml to a database. This will be for already defined tables and fields. So what is the best way to accomplish this? So far I am leaning toward programatic. I have been seeing varios options, one is Data Transfer Objects (DTO), in the SQL Server there is the sp_xml_preparedocument that is used to get transfer XMLs to an object and throught code.
I am using CSharp and SQL Server 2005. The fields are not XML fields, they are the usual SQL datatypes.

Answer 1

In an attempt to try and help, we may need some clarification. Maybe by restating the problem you can let us know if this is what you're asking:
How can one import existing xml into a SQL 2005 database, without relying on the built-in xml type?
A fairly straight forward solution that you already mentioned is the sp_xml_preparedocument, combined with openxml.
Hopefully the following example illustrates the correct usage. For a more complete example checkout the MSDN docs on Using OPENXML.
declare #XmlDocumentHandle int
declare #XmlDocument nvarchar(1000)
set #XmlDocument = N'<ROOT>
<Customer>
<FirstName>Will</FirstName>
<LastName>Smith</LastName>
</Customer>
</ROOT>'
-- Create temp table to insert data into
create table #Customer
(
FirstName varchar(20),
LastName varchar(20)
)
-- Create an internal representation of the XML document.
exec sp_xml_preparedocument #XmlDocumentHandle output, #XmlDocument
-- Insert using openxml allows us to read the structure
insert into #Customer
select
FirstName = XmlFirstName,
LastName = XmlLastName
from openxml ( #XmlDocumentHandle, '/ROOT/Customer',2 )
with
(
XmlFirstName varchar(20) 'FirstName',
XmlLastName varchar(20) 'LastName'
)
where ( XmlFirstName = 'Will' and XmlLastName = 'Smith' )
-- Cleanup xml document
exec sp_xml_removedocument #XmlDocumentHandle
-- Show the data
select *
from #Customer
-- Drop tmp table
drop table #Customer
If you have an xml file and are using C#, then defining a stored procedure that does something like the above and then passing the entire xml file contents to the stored procedure as a string should give you a fairly straight forward way of importing xml into your existing table(s).

Answer 2

If your XML conforms to a particular XSD schema, you can look into using the "xsd.exe" command line tool to generate C# object classes that you can bind the XML to, and then form your insert statements using the properties of those objects: MSDN XSD Doc

Answer 3

Peruse this document and it will give you the options:
MSDN: XML Options in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Answer 4

You may want to use XSLT to transfer your XML into SQL statements... ie
<xml type="user">
<data>1</data>
<data>2</data>
<xml>
Then the XSLT would look like
<xsl:template match="xml">
INSERT INTO <xsl:value-of select="#type" /> (data1, data2) VALUES (
'<xsl:value-of select="data[1]" />',
'<xsl:value-of select="data[2]" />');
</xsl:template>
The match statement most likely won't be the root node, but hopefully you get the idea. You may also need to wrap the non xsl:value-of parts in xsl:text to prevent extra characters from being dumped into the query. And you'd have to make sure the output of the XSLT was text. That said you could get a list of SQL statements that you could run through the DB. or you could use XSLT to output a T-SQL statement that you could load as a stored procedure.