SQLXML

SQL XML
SQLXML is a really interesting feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2000. It allows you to send SQL statements or XML queries to the server and get XML back. For instance you can send a SELECT statement to get back a list of currency codes. This would be very useful in an SEA style web applications. It also has support for SOAP Web Services, XPath queries, and SQL templates for other operations, like UPDATE and INSERT.

Since SQLXML is accepting SQL and making the database queries through native drivers, it should perform and scale significantly better than DME.

Authentication and Security
Authentication is managed by IIS virtual directory permissions. Since this utility is native to SQL Server database, security would be limited to the table and column security managed directly by the database. Lawson currently has a utility to dump SQL statements from LAUA data, bldibmsec for db2, to a script file. This script is executed on the database and applies grant/revoke privileges to table and column entities. This native database security is used to secure direct database access with ODBC, OleDB etc and would apply to SQLXML access.

What this means to the enterprise
I believe that it would be possible use to SQLXML to access enterprise Database Information. This would provide direct URL based XML data access without the need to go through a custom DB layer. The drawbacks include lack of support for metadata and custom security. Also, Oracle and DB2 support for an SQLXML standard is not clear. Giving SQL database access to application developers provides more flexibility and also opens the door for problems like database tuning, index design, and SQL syntax issues between db vendors.

More Information
http://www.sqlxml.org/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28001300