Bright Eyed Mister Zen "Oracle 9i is now by every definition that I know of, a native XML database. And in my opinion is also the most complete and powerful native XML database around. It allows you many options for how XML is stored in the database. It can be stored in CLOBs, mapped to tables or any combination thereof that may be necessary for an application. Regardless of how the XML is stored it appears to SQL as an XMLType. This enables XMLType as a type within the relational model and opens the full richness of relational manipulation to XML data. They've provided some extension functions to SQL to enable accessing data within XMLType instances and then using that data within SQL queries. I expected this to be very cumbersome, and I guess it is, but the familiarity of SQL makes it surprisingly comfortable to use. Something I can't say about XQuery. In fact, I really have to question why Oracle would even want to add XQuery given how their SQL extensions work. There just isn't any need for it. Hell, with their SQL method you can even update XML, something XQuery can't do at all." (via Dave Winer)