Thanks Infoworld for this long but yet worth reading article.
With Oracle"s annual OpenWorld conference on the horizon, database vendors are preparing for battle once again. This time around, the big three -- IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft -- are brandishing XML as the not-so secret weapon for making their databases faster and using it to anchor Web services.
Microsoft is readying its charge into the enterprise-class arena with the forthcoming version of SQL Server, code-named Yukon. Yukon is being hailed as an XML-savvy, back-end engine for Microsoft"s .Net Web services initiative.
The second, and perhaps more important, design goal for Yukon is language independence, said Barry Goffe, group product manager of the .Net enterprise server group. "We"ve had this vision for a long time: to have a multilanguage database," Goffe said.
To create that multilanguage database, Microsoft is arming Yukon to host XML natively in the database and is making XML a definable column type, which enables XML data to more effectively be searched and retrieved, said Stan Sorenson, director of server marketing at Microsoft.