Hi Didier, I hope life is well.

Please read my ICDE 2001 and XML 2000 papers on providing access to SQL
Server via the web. It covers the XML capabilities and the HTTP
capabilities (but not the SOAP capabilities) of SQL Server 2000 and
gives answers to questions such as what is being returned: hierarchical
XML and not flat rowsets in the format that the user specified using
his/her annotated schema. XSLT can be applied for additional
post-processing etc.

Best regards
Michael (going back to lurking...)

>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Didier PH Martin [mailto:martind@[...].com]
>  Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 17:54 PM
>  To: Joshua Allen; John Cowan
>  Cc: John Cowan; Adam Turoff; Michael Kay; xml-dev@[...].org
>  Subject: Re: Re: [xml-dev] What does SOAP really add?
>  
>  Hi Joshua
>  
>  Joshua said:
>  SQL Server has a concept of a XML-SQL mapping that lets you put XPath
as
>  part of the URI.  Something like:
>  
>  http://www.server.com/databases/northwind.xsd/customers/orders[qty >
>  '5']
>  
>  I am pretty sure that Oracle does this as well.
>  
>  I personally think that this idea of an "XML View" is a great way to
>  webify a relational database and make all of the data universally
>  addressable.  It is also consistent with RESTful idea of "mediated
view"
>  over a resource.  SQL data thus exposed is accessible from XSLT
>  document() function, and all of the other GET clients.
>  
>  Didier replies:
>  This is maybe the start of a solution. I guess that what is returned
is a
>  row. What if I want a hierarchical dataset like for instance an
invoice
>  composed from the client table and the inventory table (and integrated
>  into
>  a single XML document). This may be needed for a particular
application.
>  
>  cheers
>  Didier PH Martin
>  
>  
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