Import XML File to SQL Table

Here is a brief example of importing an XML file into SQL Server table. This is accomplished by using the BULK option of OPENROWSET to load the file, and then utilizing the XQuery capabilities of SQL Server to parse the XML to normalized table format. This example requires SQL server 2005 or SQL Server 2008.

First, the following XML is saved to XML file C:\Products.xml.

<Products>
  <Product>
    <SKU>1</SKU>
    <Desc>Book</Desc>
  </Product>
  <Product>
    <SKU>2</SKU>
    <Desc>DVD</Desc>
  </Product>
  <Product>
    <SKU>3</SKU>
    <Desc>Video</Desc>
  </Product>
</Products>

Next, a table named Products is created to store the XML data.

CREATE TABLE Products(
 sku INT PRIMARY KEY,
 product_desc VARCHAR(30));

Finally, the following statement will load the XML file, parse the XML elements to columns, and insert into the Products table:

INSERT INTO Products (sku, product_desc) 
SELECT X.product.query('SKU').value('.', 'INT'),
       X.product.query('Desc').value('.', 'VARCHAR(30)')
FROM ( 
SELECT CAST(x AS XML)
FROM OPENROWSET(
     BULK 'C:\Products.xml',
     SINGLE_BLOB) AS T(x)
     ) AS T(x)
CROSS APPLY x.nodes('Products/Product') AS X(product);

Here are the results:

SELECT sku, product_desc 
FROM Products;
 
/*
 
Results:
 
sku         product_desc
----------- -------------
1           Book
2           DVD
3           Video
 
*/

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