title: Get the names of attributes from an element in a SQL XML column
body: <p>For this xml (in a SQL 2005 XML column):   </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;doc&gt;
   &lt;a&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;
   &lt;b ba="1" bb="2" bc="3" /&gt;
   &lt;c bd="3"/&gt;
  &lt;doc&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'd like to be able to retrieve the names of the attributes (ba, bb, bc, bd) rather than the values <em>inside SQL Server 2005</em>. Well, XPath certainly allows this with name() but SQL doesn't support that. This is my chief complaint with using XML in SQL; you have to figure out which parts of the XML/Xpath/XQuery spec are in there.  </p>
  
  <p>The only way I can think of to do this is to build a CLR proc that loads the XML into an XML Document (iirc) and runs the XPath to extract the names of the nodes. I'm open to suggestions here. </p>