How is fastest way to construct an XML node then a bunch of slow xquery
modify statements?

This SQL Server 2005 logic is rather slow to simply add a new item to an xml
document. Any way to do this all in one statement and faster for creating a
new node without having to re-select to set the attribute values?

set @currentItems.modify('insert <Item></Item> as first into
(/Items/ParentItem[(@id=sql:variable("@parentItemID"))])[1]')
set @currentItems.modify('insert (attribute id {sql:variable("@itemID")},
attribute length {sql:variable("@metadataLength")}, attribute activityDate
{sql:variable("@activityDate_xml")}) into
(/Items/ParentItem[(@id=sql:variable("@parentItemID"))]/Item)[1]')
set @currentItems.modify('replace value of
(/Items/ParentItem[(@id=sql:variable("@parentItemID"))]/@totalCount)[1] with
((/Items/ParentItem[(@id=sql:variable("@parentItemID"))]/@totalCount)[1] +
1)')
set @currentItems.modify('replace value of
(/Items/ParentItem[(@id=sql:variable("@parentItemID"))]/@lastModified)[1]
with sql:variable("@lastModified_xml")')


One idea is to do this in a CLR function that uses a simple string builder
to create the node, but then it has to be reserialized and there is CLR
overhead. Any ideas on how to make this faster?