What's the current "best" for parsing XML?

For reasons I'm not going to go into, we cannot make a database table to hold permission info at this time. So, I decided to make an XML document that will represent my future database info. The Java classes that build the page need to read in the XML document and lookup the nodes pertinent for that page. What is the suggested parser for this use? I used Xerces in the past, but I thought I would check to see what's being used more recently.

Generally the suggested parser is whatever is built into your JVM. Usually it isn't worth the trouble of trying to use a different parser unless you have specialized requirements.

And if you are talking about a web application (you didn't say) then trying to use a different parser gets you into a power struggle against the application container, which prefers to use the built-in parser. This struggle really isn't worth the trouble unless you really, really need a different parser.