This is useful if you only need to read the data. If you need to process it in large amounts, its not so useful. And what if you need to traverse graph-like dat

This is useful if you only need to read the data. If you need to process it in large amounts, its not so useful. And what if you need to traverse graph-like data in an XML format? > a binary dump does not provide any clues as to how the data was structured True, but if that binary format is SQlite, the structure is fully documented. You could work it out mentally just as you could work out any given XML schema.