Question

Instead of writing the SQL query, is there any lazy way to get the data from database in XML format.

Answer 1

Well… Rails is a framework for Ruby that can accomplish what you are looking for, give this a try in a controller:

respond_to do |format|
  if @obj.save!
    format.xml {}
  end
end

Activerecord can do lots of other magic as well.

After installing rails you must install the Gem for SQL Server:

sudo gem install activerecord-sqlserver-adapter --source=http://gems.rubyonrails.org

Then add a few things to your database.yml to get it to work with SQL Server:

development:
  ...
  adapter: sqlserver
  mode: odbc
  dsn: sqlserverapp 
  ...

Rails has some cool methods for manipulating and reading XML built in, but I suggest the gem Nokogiri.