How to query against exact values in XML column set I have a table that contains 80+ sparse columns along with a column set column, this is a brief example:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #ColumnSet
GO

CREATE TABLE #ColumnSet
(
    Id        INT          NOT NULL
  , Value1    VARCHAR(100) SPARSE NULL 
  , Value2    VARCHAR(100) SPARSE NULL 
  , Value3    VARCHAR(100) SPARSE NULL 
  , Value4    VARCHAR(100) SPARSE NULL 
  , AllValues XML COLUMN_SET FOR ALL_SPARSE_COLUMNS
)
GO

INSERT INTO #ColumnSet
(Id, Value1, Value2, Value3, Value4)

VALUES
(1, 'POSITIVE', NULL, NULL, NULL),
(2, 'NEGATIVE', NULL, 'NEGATIVE', NULL),
(3, NULL, NULL, 'NEGATIVE', 'POSITIVE'),
(4, 'NEGATIVE', NULL, 'THIS IS NOT A POSITIVE RESULT', NULL)
GO


I want to query the column set to identify rows where any of the columns has a value of POSITIVE.

Using the value method on the column set will concatenate all the values together into one string and I could use LIKE but I don't want results where the value is within another string.

SELECT
    *

FROM
    #ColumnSet

WHERE
    AllValues.value('/', 'nvarchar(4000)') LIKE '%POSITIVE%'


Are there alternative methods of querying a column set to achieve the above? Using APPLY along with the nodes method provides the same concatenated string output though my syntax could be incorrect.

The required output :

id
1
3
Specifying the text() node before the predicate will be more efficient than having text() in the predicate.

select *
from #ColumnSet as C
where AllValues.exist('*/text()[. = "POSITIVE"]') = 1






Query plan with text in the predicate AllValues.exist('*[text() = "POSITIVE"]') = 1