If you do not want to store the XML data as files and want to maintain the complete data in a database, you can store the xml document into the database as BLOB or CLOB type. This would store the XML file in the binary format. This approach is recommended only if you want to store or retrieve the XML file in its entirety. But retrieving a specific element/attribute from XML document would have performance constraints as the complete XML document has to be loaded to fetch even a single record.