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XML DOM, the Document Object Model, is a general-purpose programming interface to access the document as a whole. It can be rather slow and memory consuming for very large files, but it's easy to handle. You can query relationships such as; go through all the child-nodes of this element.

SAX on the other hand, the Simple API (Application Programming Interface) for XML is an even oriented mechanism to retrieve XML information. The document structure as a whole is lost here, but the process doesn't need to read in all data at once and therefore can be used to stream access even very large XML files.