Search Engines picking up XML content

I am in the process of creating a new site and SEO will be a priority. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on using XML. I will be needing to extract content from a SQL database through an XML feed. Will this content/links be able to be picked up by the spiders, se's or will it produce no effect whatsoever. I do have the option of using a JavaScript call to bring up the content but from what I've heard, you usually want to stay away from js. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

I'm not very familiar with XML, but RSS-feeds (which are XML) are not indexed properly according to my experiences. I have just checked two websites, no cache is shown. If you search especially for RSS-feeds, you will probably see that the SER shows a text saying Fileformat: Unknown, and you have the option to click on a HTML-version. The HTML-version were empty on those two pages I checked.

And just for your information, one of the RSS-feeds are mine so I know it has been on the web for a long period.

thanks for the reply. The content will be very similar to an RSS feed.
Should i assume that the se's will not pick up this content? Since this will
be the majority of my 'real' content on each page, its important for this feed to
be indexable.
thanks again

Again, I can only point to my own RSS-feed. On my website I have SE-friendly URL's, but those URL's in the RSS-feed isn't, they are regular querystrings (I had to, if not my RSS-feed wouldn't work). Google isn't showing any of those URL's in the SER so it look's like the feed isn't indexed, and those URL's aren't followed.

Before I switched to SE-friendly URL's they looked like those in the RSS-feed, and they were followed. So it isn't because the URL's in the feed are using querystrings.