Non-obvious but true: SQL's XML type instances are not DOM documents by default
Darshan Sighn, publisher of YukonXML posted an interested question on the SQL2005 XML newsgroup yesterday asking how to force an untyped XML instance to be like an normal XML document where there is a single root element. I'm not sure there's a way to do that just yet, short of a column constraint based in an XQuery that Darshan later posted. But our conversation brought out an interesting question from Roger Jennings; "For typed instances, isn't the document modifier superfluous?"
Continues here.