I think you miss understood me. I am not using XML as a dump format for my database. I am using the default export format of SQL insert statements.

The reason I need to parse XML, is because the script I am re-factoring emits results in the form of XML and text files as well as inserts into a database. I need to make sure the file output is functionally identical as well as the database output.

In terms of comparing the XML, I think using XMLin will be sufficient, as most of the consumers of the XML files are other perl scripts (that I don't control), so if the before and after XML is identical as far as XML::Simple is concerned, then it should be acceptable to those consuming perl scripts.