XML API and Application Support

DB2 introduced a new SQL column type in the database, the XML data type.
Applications can bind various language specific data types for input and output
of XML columns or parameters. These existing language specific data types
only allow the user to work with XML as character or binary types.

In order to use XML efficiently and seamlessly, new language specific XML
types are added to the existing client interfaces. These new language specific
XML types enable the database to be more efficient and enable the database
to supply a richer API for the applications. By making XML explicit in the
application, the database will avoid unnecessary and/or unwanted code
page conversions. XML documents have an internal encoding declaration
which makes all but the XML parser’s transcoding unnecessary. Avoiding
unnecessary code page conversions is often an important performance
benefit. Additionally, transcoding an XML document without carefully
adjusting the XML encoding declaration might make the XML document
invalid.

All the major database interfaces are supporting the XML type natively, i.e.
treating XML data as XML, not as a character type. Below, we will touch
on JDBC, ODBC, .NET, and embedded SQL.