Parsing large amounts of data

I want to try and prove how powerful and natively compiled C types are to programmers by showing the difference in parsing large amounts of XML. We can take the geographic data from the government as the test data for this experiment (http://www.epa.gov/enviro/geospatial-data-download-service).

Let's look at the size of this XML data:

 ls -liah
total 480184
7849156 drwxr-xr-x   5 redbrain  staff   170B 25 Jul 16:42 ./
5803438 drwxr-xr-x  11 redbrain  staff   374B 25 Jul 16:41 ../
7849208 -rw-r--r--@  1 redbrain  staff   222M  9 Mar 04:27 EPAXMLDownload.xml
7849030 -rw-r--r--@  1 redbrain  staff    12M 25 Jul 16:38 EPAXMLDownload.zip
7849174 -rw-r--r--   1 redbrain  staff    57B 25 Jul 16:42 README

It's huge! Before we write programs, we need to understand a little bit about the structure of this data to see what we want to do with it. It contains facility site locations with addresses. This seems to be the bulk of the data in here, so let's try and parse it all...