Calling a Web Service from within SQL Server

More and more shops are implementing web services. Doing this provides an architecture that allows applications to consume services to retrieve data. These services could be within your own organization or from a business partner. One of the problems you might run into when building applications that consume web services is how you can use web services data within a SQL Server instance. One of the reasons you might want to do this is so you can join a record set that is returned from a web service with one of your SQL Server tables. This can easily be done within an application, but how do you do this within a stored procedure that only runs within the context of SQL Server. In this article I will discuss one approach for doing this.