Database

For applications that work across several organizations, it is easier to exchange documents in a common format. This is how the Web works. A Web server receives requests for HTML documents from a Web browser. This process has proved to scale well to millions of users. HTML is a good format but it is intended for human consumption only. XML, as we have seen, is similar but can be manipulated by applications. XML brings its emphasis on structure, its extensibility, its scalability, and its versatility to the data tiers. XML tags define pieces of data and their relationships to one another. These tags and the data they characterize are stored in plain-text f iles with a special filename extension, that is easily accessed by programs on a given computer or passed across a network from one machine to another. As we have seen, it is also possible to make modifications to XML files in order to make them suitable for human consumption. That is to say, it is possible to teach a machine to look at the nested XML tags and their contents and translate it all into a presentation that makes visual sense.

In this chapter we will focus on delivering data to clients like Web browsers, other servers, etc, using XML as the generic mechanism. This chapter presents the delivery of data to clients using files generated by Microsoft's SQL Server.

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