Sarbanes-Oxley mandates that public companies should be able to produce all materially relevant transactions during an audit.

In the world of service oriented architecture, huge volumes of business documents flow freely as messages between services. These services are orchestrated (or choreographed if you wish) to produced business processes. To give you some idea of the volume, some people fear that the volume of XML is starting to take larger and larger fractions of network bandwidth. This is why some are starting to push the use of Binary XML for SOA messages.

In this world of huge stores of electronic messages and documents, how in the world do you find all the relevant ones? This is where XML Schema comes to the rescue. Your XML documents should be defined with schema, and hence subject to validation. Performance considerations may dictate that you do not validate your documents during message processing. Nonetheless, with schema definitions you should be able to query your messages to search and find the relevant documents.

For example, if you need to find all transactions with a given company worth over a certain threshold, you have to the tools to find it.