You should go through a SAX 2 tutorial and learn the JAXP API. Basically, with SAX 2 you create a content handler class that will read through the XML file. There are methods for different types of events that occur when reading the markup; you could put the code that stores the data in Oracle in one or more of these methods. A next step would be to pick up DOM basics as well as JDOM stuff. This will help you make decisions on what technologies to use for XML processing. You can post specific problems and issues to these forums as you go. Good luck!