Back in uni there was a contest for an efficient XML parser from some company elsewhere in Europe. The problem was efficient parsing of XML files around 10 GiB

Back in uni there was a contest for an efficient XML parser from some company elsewhere in Europe. The problem was efficient parsing of XML files around 10 GiB and more – apparently the European standard data format for bank transactions (or the log of them, I don't remember precisely) is XML and for the Central Bank such large files were not uncommon. Makes me really wonder why they went with that format.