Hi Eric,

Not necessarily.  If you're up for trying PostgreSQL, their XML
functionality works *really* well.

http://www.throwingbeans.org/tech/postgresql_and_xml.html

I haven't tried using anything but selects on this, but in theory using
a simple SQL update query with an XPath you could edit your data.  The
link above is a bit dated, but I think the code to make XPath 1.0 work
with SQL queries is shipped with the Postgres source in the contrib/
directory.

Clay

Eric Lease Morgan wrote:

> Again, thank you for the prompt reply.
>
> Actually, the implementation you suggest was the path I was
> considering. Unfortunately, this means leaving some sort of text lying
> around on my file system for importing. Similarly, it poses the problem
> of editing; in order to edit data in such an implementation I will need
> to export the big chunk, edit, and re-import. That is sort of klunky,
> but still it is what I was considering.
>