In addition to the support for connecting to database servers, Delphi lets you work with XML documents as if they were database servers. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language for describing structured data. XML documents provide a standard, transportable format for data that is used in Web applications, business-to-business communication, and so on. For information on Delphi's support for working directly with XML documents, see Working with XML Documents. 

Support for working with XML documents in database applications is based on a set of components that can convert data packets (the Data property of a client dataset) into XML documents and convert XML documents into data packets. To use these components, you must first define the transformation between the XML document and the data packet. Once you have defined the transformation, you can use special components to

• convert XML documents into data packets.
• provide data from and resolve updates to an XML document.
• use an XML document as the client of a provider.