Where can I find information on shredding xml with .nodes?

Question

I recently saw this answer on SO which uses the "local-name" value while shredding xml using .nodes(). I've never seen this before:

select T.N.value('local-name(.)', 'varchar(128)') as Name,
       T.N.value('.', 'varchar(max)') as Value
from @xml.nodes('/data/*') as T(N);

Where can I find the definitive document on commands like .nodes() and .value()?

Answer 1

Those methods are part of the xml data type in Sql Server, starting from 2005, since the xml data type was implemented for Sql Server 2005.

The local-name method is part of XQuery implementation of Sql Server. Its far from being a complete implementation of the XQuery specification, but it can be helpful.