Returning and Inserting/Updating XML Data in Oracle For Oracle 9i and higher, the Oracle data provider supports the XML data type. By default, the data provider maps the XMLtype data type to the .NET String data type. Returning XML Data The data provider can return XML data as character data. For example, given a database table defined as: CREATE TABLE xmlTable (id int, xmlCol xml NOT NULL) the data provider returns the XML data from the database as character data. By default, the data provider maps the XMLtype data type to the .NET String data type. The result set column is described with a column type of String and the column type name is xml. You also can use the following methods to return data stored in XML columns as character data: GetChars()GetString()GetValue()GetValues()GetXmlReader() NOTE: See “OracleDataReader Class” for information about the overloaded GetXmlReader method. Inserting/Updating XML Data The data provider can insert or update XML data as character or binary data. Character Data You can use the following methods to insert or update XML data as character data: GetChars()GetString()GetValue()GetValues()GetXmlReader() NOTE: See “OracleDataReader Class” for information about the overloaded GetXmlReader method. The data provider converts the character representation of the data to the XML character set used by the database server and sends the converted XML data to the server. The data provider does not parse or remove any XML processing instructions. The data provider interprets the data returned by these methods using the ISO-8859-1 (latin 1) encoding. The data provider converts the data from ISO-8859-1 to the XML character set used by the database server and sends the converted XML data to the server.