Oracle Database 10g XML & SQL: Design, Build, & Manage XML Applications in Java, C, C++, & PL/SQL

CHAPTER 24Building an XML Data-Retrieval Application

As XML becomes the industry standard for exchanging business data, the capability to retrieve selective data from large XML documents becomes increasingly more important. Because XPath is the XML navigational language, it lies at the foundation of standards-based data-retrieval solutions. XPath-supported solutions such as XSLT require creation and traversal of the input XML’s Document Object Model (DOM). In practice, DOMs require up to ten times the memory of the original document because DOMs include traversal APIs that are difficult to optimize. Other XML processing methods, such as SAX and StAX, are event-based and require less memory; however, they lack the desired XPath support for retrieving ...