Add OPENXML support to Fabric DataWarehouse

[BOB10]

We have OPENJSON support which is very useful when we have Json in data tables.

However many vendors and sources today use XML for extensibility and not JSON.

Lack of OPENXML is limiting our ability to migrate from SqlDBEngine to Fabric and prevents in db querying of XML.

Ideally support should be as per

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/openxml-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16

[fbcideas_migusr]

Much needed in Fabric, please do include this

[fbcideas_migusr]

Good Idea!!

[aidan2]

Much needed!

[fbcideas_migusr]

A much needed support

[jason18]

This has been a long standing gap in dedicated pool / serverless pool support as well. full xml data type support is also useful here because many clients have data stored in the XML data type.

I'm not sure we need a native XML datatype but to implement the xml parsing functions and provide a means to load data from an xml document or document fragment into a nvarchar(max) and provid the ability to shred from within a sql environment (in a similar manner to how the json functions work) would greatly simplify ETL processing and querying of XML data.

[jovanpop-msft]

OPENXML(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/openxml-transact-sql) is designed to work with a single XML document unlike OPENJSON that can work with JSON columns in tables. The existing syntax of OPENXML cannot be easily used to query table data due to the fact that is requires preparing each individual XML document to get the handle. Therefore, it is unlikely to expect that we will support OPENXML in the existing syntax.

OPENXML is useful when a single parameter is passed to stored procedure and transformed to query predicate, but even in this scenario Table Value Variables/Parameters are the recommended approach.

For the real XML support, I would really recommend xml types, and for this we would like to understand your scenarios.

Please contact me to describe your use case with XML, and we would be happy to consider it. Also, feel free to describe scenario in comments when you vote or reference external article that describes the expected usage.