Two different approaches to eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data management are explored. One approach uses conventional database techniques to address XML formatted data. That approach is also known as XML-enabled database systems. An alternative technique uses XML formats as its basic storage format, and is called native XML database systems. Oracle and other leading RDBMS vendors have extended their basic RDBMS functionality to include XML data management abilities. This type of database is called XML-enabled. When XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol)-enabled database are used, data can be transferred from relational tables to XML documents in both ways. Use of XML-enabled database can be done in two ways: by storing the entire XML document in XMLType column:CLOB and by mapping an XML document's structure to database columns (XML SQL utility). Topics covered are eXist (native XML database), XMLType:CLOB, XSU (XML SQL utility), performance, XML:DB Xpath, experiment results, and why native XML Database (NXD) is needed. eXist is the NXD used in the experiment because it is written in Java, is open source, is platform-neutral, and the search engine is optimized as compared to other NXDs, including Xindice. In addition it provides support for document and node updates, and indexes for elements, attributes, and keywords are organized by collections instead of by document. Results of the experiment show that eXist's query engine performs better than the tree-transversal-based approach, such as Jaxen, by an order of magnitude. To leverage the advantages of NXD and RDBMS, a combined solution is recommended.