If (Micro$oft|Oracle|Sun|...) says you need to be using XML, you probably don't need to be doing so (and check your wallet).</sarcasm>

If you probably won't be sending the data between multiple systems, you may not need to use it. Consider having a simpler, easier to parse format for your regular data. Then make a simple => XML filter which mogrifies it for external consumption.

Addendum: I agree with the sugguestions for a DB file as being more than sufficient for the data you gave as an example. Even that might be overkill if you don't need random access to all the records; simply appending lines to a delimited text file might work just as well.