Question

I have a table which has XMLData column as TEXT. How can i read the data from this column

Answer 1

As long as that column is of type TEXT, you won’t be able to do anything useful with it, really. TEXT also has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version of SQL Server – stop using it.

If it stores XML and only XML – make it of datatype XML.

One you have that, you can either extract individual items of information from that XML using XPath and XQuery – something like:

SELECT
    YourXMlColumn.value('(/Root/SomeItems/Item/FirstName)[1]', 'varchar(50)') as 'FirstName',
    YourXMlColumn.value('(/Root/SomeItems/Item/Age)[1]', 'int') as 'Age'
FROM
    dbo.YourTable
WHERE
    (some condition)

or if you have multiple items in a list-like structure inside your XML, you can create a “pseudo-table” of XML items based on an XPath expression.

So your plan of action should be:

1. make this column use the appropriate datatype – XML
2. tell us in more detail what kind of XML you have stored in there, and what you want to get from that XML