Could I read it in a line at a time, look for the appropriate start/stop tags and parse it that way?
If your XML is formatted in a manner which is conducive to line-by-line parsing then it shouldn't be a problem.

Alternatively, if your database dump is just a sequence of one kind of element, this should also work: 

open(XML, "<", ...);
{
  local($/) = '</record>';
  while (<XML>) { ...process one <record> element... }
}

[download]

With regard to why your experiment on the 400M record table is taking so long... are you grabbing 1M records at a time by using a LIMIT clause (i.e. LIMIT n, 1000000)? If you have any index on that table (say on column colX), adding ORDER BY colX should help speed things along.

In reply to Re: XML parsing - huge file strategy? by pc88mxer
in thread XML parsing - huge file strategy? by ethrbunny

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