The development of XML stored procedures in XML enabled databases

In Relational Databases (RDB), the concept of stored procedures is quite familiar to users, these being procedural methods that can be used for data retrieval and manipulation. When users want to query or manipulate data, they can utilize these methods and pass in the parameters. By doing so, the users do not need to perform ad-hoc queries every time they want to perform typical actions. In contrast, XML databases offer no support for such methods as yet, meaning that users have to write ad-hoc XQuery or XPath, which can be time consuming, prone to errors and not user-friendly. This paper investigates how SQL stored procedures can be developed to effectively conduct various XQuery and XPath against XML data within the enabled databases. For implementation, we use SQL Server 2008.