Don't forget that you have a great database at your fingertips: the filesystem!
Lots of programmers forget that a decent directory-file structure is/has:
- It's fast as hell
- It's portable
- It has a tiny runtime footprint
People are talking about splitting up XML files into multiple XML files... I would consider splitting your XML into multiple directories and multiple plaintext files.
Give it a go. It's refreshingly fast.
