EXPERT RESPONSE
Can I see any benefit? Well, yes and no. If you are looking for the
best performance, go with the ref cursors. If you are looking for
the best maintainability, go with XML. Your needs are probably
somewhere in between those two extremes.
.NET is based on XML and has a lot of ease-of-use features for
working with XML. Your developers are probably very comfortable
working wth XML. Those would be benefits from providing them XML.
There are downsides though. Additional coding on the database side (but
not much anymore in 10g) and some performance hit (but not nearly as
bad as it used to be).
I guess my answer is that it depends. Without more information I
can't make a specific recommendation but I will say the XML has its
pluses. Check out the XMLType datatype. If you can use that, your
coding will be minimal.
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