With the widespread diffusion of XML as a format for representing data generated and exchanged over the Web, main query and update engines have been designed and implemented in the last decade. A kind of engines that are playing a crucial role in many applications are « main-memory » systems, which distinguish for the fact that they are easy to manage and to integrate in a programming environment. On the other hand, main-memory systems have scalability issues, as they load the entire document in main-memory before processing. This Thesis presents an XML partitioning technique that allows main-memory engines to process a class of XQuery expressions (queries and updates), that we dub « iterative », on arbitrarily large input documents. We pro...