Spent some time today working on importing a largish XML file (approx 46MB) into SQL Server. I didn’t spend any time thinking about the best way to do it, just the only way I knew how… read it into memory, parse out the parts you want.. it was taking 90 seconds just to read it into memory. Is there a better way?

This is a pretty cool way to look at your outlook mail.

tomorrow @ MINDSEYE I’m giving a presentation to management/design/creative on XML, basically a high level overview of what it is and how they should be thinking about it. After working with Spectra, which used a pseudo XML called WDDX to store data, I’ve created a couple different methods (CF/ASP/JSP) of managing data in web applications, but none of them have been automatic, meaning you couldn’t just send fire method x on object A and persist the data to the db. Data Binding or data persistence does do that… I just haven’t been able to use it in a site yet… so, here’s a link to an article on xml.com about data binding and XML which compares .NET to Java’s open source castor framework. Really interesting. I need this book too.