For 100% polyester fabrics use 1.5 lb. of dye per 100 lbs. of fabric (1.5% OWG) to get medium shades. (With black, you are going to get more of a charcoal grey with this product.) That would be 6 - 4 oz packets, so 3 for 50 lbs. of fabric, etc.
XML data type was introduced in SQL Server 2005. This type allows you to store XML data up to 2 GB. Here is a small example of, pretty much self-explanatory.
A good example of a date format that is not recognized by SQL Server is an 8 digit date in MMDDYYYY format, this 8 character date format is not recognized by SQL Server as a date. In order to get the MMDDYYYY date into SQL Server you will need to convert it to a format that SQL Server knows is a date, like 'MM-DD-YYYY'.