XML System Stored Procedures
Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 provides these system stored procedures that are used in conjunction with OPENXML:
To write queries using OPENXML, you must first create an internal representation of the XML document by calling sp_xml_preparedocument. The stored procedure returns a handle to the internal representation of the XML document. This handle is then passed to OPENXML, which provides rowset views of the document based on Xpaths; namely one row pattern and one or more column patterns.
The internal representation of an XML document can be removed from memory by calling sp_xml_removedocument system stored procedure.