xml database!!

Hi all,

Now before you say use sql my company/departments IT infrastructure is locked down we can't install any programs or use any outside (web based ) datastore.

firstly yes anyone know if adding a record to the end of an xml file rewrites the whole file?
So now on to my problem we have to track goods-in and goods-out now generally only one person would be adding a new item a time but lots of people may view it I was thinking of using a master - slave xml structure so main file lists each child and links to the individual child file this way each child can be created / edited without worrying about concurrency I would only have to worry about concurrency with the master file but I could lock that whilst an element was added and just force the other users to wait in a que to add there element.

the biggest problem would be LOTS of very small files to open to read each record which could be very disk intensive.

alternatively I was thinking if the I could lock a child entry from being edited.

<parent>
<Child info1>
<child info2 locked>
<parent>

My other thought was for each user to have there own litedb but then how could view each users records in one big grid view

Kind regards Tim