SQL Server queries can be returned as a valid XML as well as a rowset (by default), there are multiple ways you could control the format the end result XML is returned in, giving SQL developers flexibility that can meet most of the demand of an application consuming this XML data. XML support has been natively built into SQL Server since the 2005 release.

In this post I will be briefly exploring the different type of XML output modes supported by SQL Server through the FOR XML statement.

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