I didn't think of them but now that you pointed them out, you are right on both observations.

1. A single table starting at zero and a pass-through view with a...

I prefer to use "Number" (one-based) so that I can distinguish it from "WholeNumber" which is zero-based. The column name I used for both tables is "value".

Use the XmlBulkLoader from the SqlXml3.0 to load your data into temp table, compare and use FOR XML AUTO|EXPLICIT|RAW to return the result back out as xml.