Jim,

I'm still working muchly with the "raw" XML functions. Lessons learned so far:

1) Reading Attributes of a node is much, much faster than reading child-elements (of the node) containing the same information... for example reading this:

Code:

<node1>
 <data1>1</data1>
 <data2>2</data2>
</node1>


is much slower then reading this:

Code:

<node1 data1="1" data2="2">
</node1>


Probably this has more to do with how one would "design" their schema, versus the UDF's themselves - just an observation.

-Shawn