I am migrating a database from Oracle 10.1 to 11.2 and I have the following problem. The statement SELECT '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>' || (Xml).getClobVal() AS XmlClob FROM ( SELECT XmlElement( "Element1", ( SELECT XmlAgg(tpx.Xml) FROM ( SELECT XmlElement("Element3",XmlForest('content' as Element4)) AS Xml FROM dual ) tpx ) AS "Element2" ) AS Xml FROM dual ) On the original 10.1 database produces XML like this... <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Element1> <Element2> <Element3> <ELEMENT4>content</ELEMENT4> </Element3> </Element2> </Element1> On the new 11.2 system it looks like this... <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Element1> <Element3> <ELEMENT4>content</ELEMENT4> </Element3> </Element1> Is there some environmental variable I am missing that tells Oracle how to format its XML. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of PL/SQL in the database; it would be a mammoth task to rewrite if it turned out they had changed they way Oracle formats XML between versions. Hopefully someone has come accross this before. Thanks