A technique for optimizing the archival and management of data stored as XML documents is capable of handling mixed data including highly structured data and unstructured data. The technique maps the structured data to a relational database while storing the unstructured data in its native XML format. The data is updated using a rules database that maps updating rules against attributes and classes of elements within the documents. A document checking/validation engine performs the updates based on rule verification. A search engine searches the documents using both a path index table and a weighted content index.