Hi, Robert,
> It seems to me that one advantage to a database is the
> ability to store as
> much data as you want without having to load it into memory
> and only loading
> part of it when you need to execute a query..
>
> Is there a way to make this a bit easier in JAXB or should I
> consider an XML
> Database?
I do not understand what your problem is. I've been using
systems comparable to JAXB (in particular Castor and JaxMe)
some years with great succes. The backends have been as
different as MySQL, DB2 and Tamino (native XML database).
IMO the best thing you can do is to combine the powers
of JAXB and an Xml database.
For example, JaxMe 1 even contains an integrated API for
storing JaxMe objects in an XML database via xml:db. See
http://jaxme.sourceforge.net/docs/XmlDb.html. Unfortunately
JaxMe 1 doesn't support the JAXB schema and JaxMe 2 does
not yet cover a persistence layer.
May be I've got your question wrong and your actually
asking whether it is best working with a large XML document
or with a lot of small documents. The former is almost always
a mistake. Normalization criteria do not apply that much
with XML, but they are still valid.
Jochen