Best way to search data in xml files?

Question

In our new project we have to provide a search functionality to retrieve data from hundreds of xml files. I have a brief of our current plan below, I would like to know your sug

Answer 1

Hmm, sounds like your building a database over the top of Xml, for performance I'd be reading those files into the DB of your choice, and let it handle indexing and searching for you. If that's not an option get really with XPath, or roll your own exhaustive search using XmlReader.

Xml is not the answer to every problem, however clean it appears to be, performance will suck.