R – IS CAML the only way to Query MOSS

The CAML is still XML and as mentioned, XSLT will be able to render it as HTML. The actual gnraly nested OR/AND structure of CAML is a whole nother issue.

That would require unrolling the CAML structure and displaying it in a way that normal people understand.

Unfortunately, the XSLT language is unsuitable for unrolling nested structures like this (it has no stack). It is possible, but having done it I recommend strongly using another language to parse and unroll the CAML.

I have yet to see a CAML to SQL conversion code. Sounds like a great Codeplex project.

So in summary... you are a bit stuffed with CAML. While it is XML, it's structure is unsuited to use in any other query language.

The same restriction applies to BeginWith. I do not know any good solution sadly. What you could do: Do a Contains-Query, loop through each item and get the IDs, then do another big query for "ID NotEqual 1 or ID NotEqual 2 or ID NotEqual 3......" Since ID is indexed as far as I know, that should have a smaller impact on the database, but it still smells really bad.

For small list it does not matter, for larger lists i'd use the SQL Server Profiler to see what the impact is.