After the second article in this series was published, several readers said that they would like to learn the .NET way to map data from XML to a relational database management system. I'd like to show you that, but first I've got to lay some groundwork. In this article, I will show how .NET XML data binding works, while investigating the equivalent Java functionality. Java and .NET both have excellent support for data binding, and although they work in slightly different ways, each is just as valid and useful as the other. In my next article, I'll complete the exercise by mapping XML files to an RDBMS.