Introduction to XML

- [Instructor] Before we get into the details…of working with XML in SQL Server,…I'd like to talk a little bit about XML itself.…XML is a text based formatting, it is human readable,…meaning XML is easily read by a human or by a computer,…and most commonly XML formatted data…is used for information exchange,…moving data from one system to another system.…Here's a sample of some XML,…so we see both the data and the metadata are mixed in,…and both are text formatted,…so in the second line, John would be the data.…

Before and after John we see metadata…enclosed in pointed brackets, these are known as tags,…and these tags serve as metadata…that tell us more information about John.…In this example, John is the to field for the note.…When using XML, we have the option to distribute information…in either attributes or elements,…attributes are inside of a tag,…and they come in key value pairs,…so in this example the key would be firstName,…and the value would be John,…and all of that information is stored in the opening tag.…