I don't understand why some people are suggesting using cross apply or outer apply to convert the xml into a table of values. For me, that just brought back way too much data.
Here's my example of how you'd create an xml object, then turn it into a table.
(I've added spaces in my xml string, just to make it easier to read.)
DECLARE @str nvarchar(2000)
SET @str = ''
SET @str = @str + '<users>'
SET @str = @str + ' <user>'
SET @str = @str + ' <firstName>Mike</firstName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <lastName>Gledhill</lastName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <age>31</age>'
SET @str = @str + ' </user>'
SET @str = @str + ' <user>'
SET @str = @str + ' <firstName>Mark</firstName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <lastName>Stevens</lastName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <age>42</age>'
SET @str = @str + ' </user>'
SET @str = @str + ' <user>'
SET @str = @str + ' <firstName>Sarah</firstName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <lastName>Brown</lastName>'
SET @str = @str + ' <age>23</age>'
SET @str = @str + ' </user>'
SET @str = @str + '</users>'
DECLARE @xml xml
SELECT @xml = CAST(CAST(@str AS VARBINARY(MAX)) AS XML)
-- Iterate through each of the "users\user" records in our XML
SELECT
x.Rec.query('./firstName').value('.', 'nvarchar(2000)') AS 'FirstName',
x.Rec.query('./lastName').value('.', 'nvarchar(2000)') AS 'LastName',
x.Rec.query('./age').value('.', 'int') AS 'Age'
FROM @xml.nodes('/users/user') as x(Rec)
And here's the output:
