rdbms - Why would I ever choose to store and manipulate XML in a relational database?

Question

Modern RDBMS's have support for XML column types and functionality for dealing with XML in stored procedures. Historically I would always have mapped hierarchical data (whether of OO objects or XML) to relational tables. Given the widespread database support for XML should I change my ways?

Answer 1

If you don't see the need then don't change!

Sometimes you have to persist data that does not have a known structure, or its structure is very volatile. In those cases, instead of creating a table, just save the XML into your existing table