EFFICIENT PARTITIONING TECHNIQUE WHILE MANAGING LARGE XML DOCUMENTS

A method is provided to efficiently evaluate an expression to determine the partition key for an XML document stored in a database without the entire XML document first being stored in temporary memory storage. The partition key is determined using streaming evaluation or incrementally using a DOM node tree as a portion of the document is read and stored in the buffer. The XML document is stored in the partition using the read portion of the document stored in the buffer and the remaining portion from the original source.