Question

I have a table ‘Blah’ with a PK column BlahID and an XML column BlahItems in a database on SQL Server 2005.

This table has records as follows…

 BlahID BlahItems ------ ------------------------------------------------------ 1      <root><item name='Fred' /><item name='Wilma' /></root> 2      <root><item name='Lisa' /><item name='Bart' /></root> 

How can I query that table to produce the following….

 BlahID BlahItem ------ -------- 1      Fred 1      Wilma 2      Lisa 2      Bart 

The closest I’ve managed to get is on a per record FUNCTION that does something along the lines of the following…

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Blahs(@id int) RETURNS @list TABLE (BlahID int, BlahItem nvarchar(max)) BEGIN     DECLARE @xml AS xml     SELECT @xml = BlahItems FROM dbo.Blah AS b WHERE b.BlahID = @id      INSERT INTO @list     SELECT @id, tbl.col.value('@name','nvarchar(max)')     FROM @xml.nodes('/root/item') tbl(col)     RETURN END  SELECT * FROM dbo.Blahs(1) 

 BlahID BlahItem ------ -------- 1      Fred 1      Wilma 

My ultimate goal is to create a VIEW of the ‘expanded’ data and then query against the view.

Answer 1

You can try this query:

SELECT BlahID, XmlItems.BlahItem.value('@name', 'nvarchar(100)') AS BlahItem FROM Blah CROSS APPLY BlahItems.nodes('/root/item') AS XmlItems(BlahItem) 

For more info check this three-part article by Alex Homer.