I have searched around but haven't found anything relevant to this topic yet so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on the subject. I have a client with an extremely database intensive website in which data is constantly being queried to build many different tables. On the main site which is password protected for a select few the data is being displayed and edited using MySQL queries. I just finished a beta version of the client site which will be skinned and run on several different client servers and this will only be displaying the data. Currently I am planning to just create a user on the main database with read only permissions, allowing each clients IP addresses access, and just doing remote mysql, however, the people I work for want to transfer all the data over XML. When I ask why they don't have a good argument but I don't have a good argument against not using XML either. Is there an advantage to use XML? There are tens of thousands of entries in the database so I'm worried that if I write functions to return XML they will have to be very specific so we aren't sending unused data. Are there any reasons XML would be better? I could see an advantage if we were sending all this data out for free but people are actually purchasing this data so we want to be able to control it, something we wouldn't be able to do with XML. Any thoughts on pros/cons of Remote MySQL vs. XML would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!