Using XML as a standard mode of information exchange between applications and the concept of Web Service is regarded widely as an achievement comparable to the development of the Internet itself. Many of today’s applications use XML in one way or the other and it is expected that this standard will gain further acceptance from the Software Engineering community with the passage of time. With its growing use, efficient and effective mechanism is required for archiving and retrieving XML data. Major database vendors now offer XML support. However, employing a resource hungry RDBMS, especially for the purpose of storing XML, is not feasible in many circumstances. A Native XML Database (NXD) attempts to solve this problem by providing a lightweight architecture to store and retrieve XML data. The focus of this paper is to provide a generic native XML database that can be used for efficiently storing and retrieving XML data without compromising on its performance, security, and interoperability issues.