XML support is being added to existing database management systems (DBMSs) and native XML systems are being developed both in industry and in academia. The individual performance characteristics of these approaches as well as the relative performance of various systems is an ongoing concern. In this paper we discuss the XBench XML benchmark and report on the relative performance of various DBMSs. XBench is a family of XML benchmarks which recognizes that the XML data that DBMSs manage are quite varied and no one database schema and workload can properly capture this variety. Thus, the members of this benchmark family have been defined for capturing diverse application domains.