With my back office software, I read the NOPCommerce SQL tables. Product attributes are stored in XML-format, eg the OrderItem table has a column AttributesXML. However, I see that the datatype is a nvarchar(MAX) and not XML. This makes it difficult to analyze the data in an SQL-view using standard SQL functions.
Any reason why NOPCommerce did it like this? What would happen if I change the datatype into XML? Are there ways to analyse nvarchar(MAX) data? How do they do it in their core?
thx for help,
Philippe