SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

XML vs Relational

We are a software vender and we have been migrating our application from SQL 2000 relational to 2005 native xml format.
Our studies have shown that having our data in native XML format in SQL 2005 presents many benefits; however, we have not been able to fully verify the performance (transaction, query, update, insert, etc…) of native XML data in comparison to relational data in SQL 2005. Does anyone know of such a comparative study or possibly has suggestions on how to setup a such a test? any help would be greatly appreciated!

What made you decide to do this? I would think you would verify the performance BEFORE you migrate your application to new technology. The database engine doesn’t support XML so you can store everything in it and get rid of the relational database. It supports it to enhance the XML benefits and allow better integration of XML data with the relational data. Where you choose to use one or the other should be a careful balance of business and application needs and efficiencies of XML as a communication and transport mechanism and the data integrity, storage, and performance benefits of the relational model. Doing something because it’s cool and new should always be tempered with common sense and doing what is right for the business. MeanOldDBA
[email protected] When life gives you a lemon, fire the DBA.

some else did this (using XML when normal data type should have been used) before realizing the horrible performance implications the purpose of XML is to facilitate passing data between different applications, ie, an application from Vendor A to Vendor B, from Company A to Company B, where directly database access between each application was not practical. it might be useful to pass a rowset with XML, but scalar values should be passed in the normal fashion

You might want to checkhttp://www.tpc.org/ if there are any "official" guidelines freely available.
In any case, don’t forget to post your test results here. —
Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
http://www.insidesql.de
Heute schon gebloggt?http://www.insidesql.de/blogs
Ich unterstÃ¼tze PASS Deutschland e.V. http://www.sqlpass.de)

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