Doing it with XML definitely sounds like your best bet. I highly recommend checking out the XML forums on this site rather than relying on the Books Online info, since they never seemed to reference any of the questions I had. Maybe they'll work better for you. If you only have 1 row coming back from the main table, XML AUTO should work, if not, you may have to find an example on how to make a false top level Node. Basically you do a JOIN to a table that doesn't actually return anything at the top level.