infopath xml datatype

[fermat]

At my organization the infopath developers have built a data capture system that feeds xml files generated by infopath forms to an SQL server. It loads the form data in one column in in an SQL database. SQL query language is used to extract the data but all the fields are read as character (string), so all the work of specifying the data type in the Infopath form is lost and all numeric data must be converted again. It seems that the xml string does not contain any information about datatype. I'm wondering if there is a way to force Infopath to put the data type information along with the values in the xml files it produces when forms are complete so that SQL can later use that information to maintain the formats in the SQL database. This seems like a very inefficient system design that I would like to somehow improve and save myself and others a lot of work.