About 9 years ago, after reading a series of articles shown below, I made a neat project out of the ideas: I built a tool that can take the output of an SQL-query (from any modern DB), and transform it into your choice of an XML-file, an HTML-file, a CSV-file, or even a WML-file (aka 'HTML'-for-a-PDA/cellphone). Long story short, I obtained starter code off the Internet, and then hacked it into submission. Testing it was a major part of the battle...so I went out and downloaded the community-editions (freeware) of DB-servers from all the important DB-vendors (e.g. MySQL, Oracle, DB2, SQLServer). [And, the beauty is, that if your fave DB-vendor isn't named, it's trivial to add support for yours into this cool-tool, due the power and flexibility of JDBC!] I chose Java/JDBC because that's what the article describes and that's what I'm most familiar with, but these days, it should be easy enough to develop the same tool using C#, if that strikes your fancy.
Needless to say, I learned a TON from my efforts on this project! [e.g. practical use of XSLT (XSL-transforms), and more exposure to other useful open-source java/db-tools like SQuirreL and SchemaSpy, just to name two.]