SQLXML

SQLXML is a former Microsoft technology family that enabled integration of XML with SQL Server. It includes tools, APIs, and runtime components designed to map relational data to XML and to generate XML from SQL queries, as well as to load XML data into relational tables. The goal was to facilitate XML-based data exchange and to provide a schema-driven approach to relate XML documents to relational structures.

Historically, SQLXML emerged in the early 2000s as part of Microsoft's data access stack and the SQL Server ecosystem. It offered an XML schema–driven mapping mechanism to describe how rows and columns corresponded to XML elements and attributes, and it provided runtime components that could produce XML results from queries or apply XML data to existing tables. This made it easier to publish relational data as XML and to ingest XML documents into a database.

In more recent SQL Server releases, Microsoft integrated XML support directly into the database engine, introducing the native XML data type and XQuery support. This evolution reduced reliance on the standalone SQLXML toolkit, and the original SQLXML components are now regarded as legacy or deprecated. Modern development typically uses the XML data type, XQuery, and related functions, along with techniques such as FOR XML to generate XML from relational data.

Today, SQLXML is referenced mainly for historical context. The core capabilities it aimed to provide—schema-based mapping between relational and XML data and XML-based data exchange—are now largely handled by native XML features in SQL Server.