XML-DBMS is a set of Java packages for transferring data between XML documents and relational databases. Programmers use these packages to build systems that transfer data; a sample application can be run from the command line to transfer data between a database and an XML file.

XML-DBMS preserves the hierarchical structure of an XML document, as well as the data (character data and attribute values) in that document. If requested, it also preserves the order in which the children at a given level in the hierarchy appear. (For many data-centric applications, such order is not important and the code runs faster without it.)

Because XML-DBMS seeks to transfer data, not documents, it does not preserve document type declarations, nor does it preserve physical structure such as entity use, CDATA sections, or document encodings. In particular, it does not attempt to implement a document management system on top of a relational database.