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

First: how big are the xml files? XmlDocument doesn't scale to "huge"... but can handle "large" OK.

Second: can you perhaps put the data into a regular database structure (perhaps SQL Server Express Edition), index it, and access via regular TSQL? That will usually out-perform an xpath search. Equally, if it is structured, SQL Server 2005 and above supports the xml data-type, which shreds data - this allows you to index and query xml data in the database without having the entire DOM in memory (it translates xpath into relational queries).