PostgreSQL8.0 supports XML!

Cool. It looks that PostgreSQL8.0 supports XML as an additional extension (contrib driectory). In gentoo you can compile it specifying +xml2 option.

Now how to use it: 1. you need to create xml functions in a database using a supplied script, most typically /usr/share/postgresql/contrib/pgxml.sql. Note that this script has been created (customized) by autoconf and contains a hard-coded location of your pgxml.so library, typically: /usr/lib/postgresql/pgxml.so.

1. If you get no error…. well that’s it

See this link and the documentation contrib/xml2 for more details.

BTW: If your database stores XML as binary strings (bytea) you must convert them to normal strings using encode(<byteacolumn>, ‘escape’);