Convert XML to table in SQL Server 2005

If I pass in an xml parameter to a stored proc which looks like this:

<ClientKeys>
   <ck>3052</ck>
   <ck>3051</ck>
   <ck>3050</ck>
   <ck>3049</ck>
   ...
 </ClientKeys>

...and then convert the XML to a temp table like this:

CREATE TABLE #ClientKeys ( ClientKey varchar(36) )  
INSERT INTO #ClientKeys (ClientKey) 
     SELECT ParamValues.ck.value('.','VARCHAR(36)')  
    FROM @ClientKeys.nodes('/ClientKeys/ck') as ParamValues(ck)   

...the temp tbl is populated and everything is good. However the time taken to populate said table is strictly proportionate to the number of 'ck' elements in the xml - which I wasn't expecting as there is no iterative step. And thus the time taken to populate the tbl soon becomes 'too long'.

Is there a quicker way to achieve the above?

Just because your source code does not contain any looping syntax does not mean there is no iteration happening. If your code is inserting 10 rows into a table, it will always take 10 times longer than inserting 1 row.

If you can move the code from the stored procedure to C#, you could use XMLBulkLoad, which was written to handle large files fast.

You can also try to run the query without the INSERT and measure the difference in performance. There's a good chance that the XML parsing is not the limiting factor.

since I don't have data two compare, I can only suggest additional bulk upload methods that you can test on your environment with your data

One of them is to upload XML using SQL OpenRowSet command

DECLARE @X XML
SELECT 
   @X = ck
FROM OPENROWSET (BULK 'C:\kodyaz.com\sql\ClientKeys.xml', SINGLE_BLOB) AS Import(ck)

Select
   [ClientKey].value('.','varchar(100)') AS ClientKey
From @X.nodes('/ClientKeys/ck') keys([ClientKey])

On the same resource there is an other option of using OPENXML command.