There are people who have 100 megabyte product catalogs in
XML files. They
obviously don't serve the whole thing to a web page, but they
do use XSLT to
process those catalogs, and produce small web pages or XML
output for reports.
So, there are several questions you can ask here. First,
what does it take
for an XSLT processor to handle XML too big to live in memory
all at once? [
That was Kevin Jones's question. ] Second, what other
techniques will help
beat the problem? XML databases? What else?
I certainly feel that if you have this much data, then in most cases it is
worth investing a little effort into storing it in a way that makes
retrieval easier and faster. Which is to say, putting it in a database.
There might be some exceptions, such as streams of data coming down from a
satellite; and I suppose you might want to transform the data on its way
into the database. But I haven't come across such applications myself.
Michael Kay