Parsing Binary XML

Binary XML is an Oracle-defined XML format for storing and processing large XML documents.

The following are some basic concepts of the binary XML format:

  All XML element tags and attributes are tokenized in binary XML.
Binary XML has an index table storing all XML element and attribute names (tokens), and their reference IDs (token IDs). In the document, all of the XML elements and attributes are referred to by the reference IDs. This reduces the XML document size, especially when long (normally meaningful) tag names are used for the XML element and attribute names.

  Binary is a pre-parsed format.
XML parsing information is stored within binary XML documents. The Oracle XML processor can quickly locate the XML objects. You can think of binary XML as serialized a DOM object, through which the XML processors know where to get the data.