Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to processing markup language documents and provide a method, system and computer program product for processing large relationship-specifying markup language documents. In an embodiment of the invention, a method can be provided for processing large relationship-specifying markup language documents. The method can include generating an index of nodes each node corresponding to a clause in the markup language document, processing the index in lieu of the markup language document, identifying clauses referenced within the index to be written to a database and extracting the identified clauses from the markup language document and writing the extracted clauses to the database.