Using XPath to copy nodes

Hi,

I'm thinking I'm missing something in the middle. Currently, I'm
optimizing this one project to dump a table into an XML document
temporarily to minimize the number of hits on the database. The
original logic had struck the database at a minimum of 200 per
creation of each document thus leading to 6 documents a minute which
is not that fast when I need to generation 50k documents.
http://dolly.mrl.unimo.it/user/view.php?id=2383

The design so far it:
---
    private Element getAnswers(Element root, String queID) throws
Exception{
        XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
        XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();

//Design the query to search through the XML Document
        String xpQry = "/answers/ques[@sequence='" + SeqNo + "' and
@item_id='" + queID + "']/answ";
//Execute the query
        XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile(xpQry);
        Object result = expr.evaluate(ansDoc, XPathConstants.NODESET);

//Store the Results
        NodeList nodes = (NodeList) result;

//Exit if there is no results found
        if(nodes.getLength() == 0){
            return root;
        }

//Get ID for later use
        xpQry = "/answers/ques[@sequence='" + SeqNo + "' and
@item_id='" + queID + "']/@id";
        expr = xpath.compile(xpQry);
        result = expr.evaluate(ansDoc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
        NodeList ansID = (NodeList) result;

//Does not append anything
        for(int nCnt=0;nCnt==nodes.getLength();nCnt++){
            Element answ = (Element) nodes.item(nCnt);

            root.appendChild(answ);
        }

        return root;
    }
===

Sample Data:
---
<?xml version='1.0'?>

<answers>
    <ques id='9447FCB8-1F77-422A-8FDA-7713CC7AE289' item_id='3BDF6103-
FC8C-4697-B93F-A49BAAAC97F2' sequence='0'>
        <answ answered='2009-03-02 13:23:00.857' device='system'
personnel='DTS, DTS'><![CDATA[Hall/Foyer]]></answ></ques></answers>
===
http://glossary.reuters.com/index.php?title=User:TRAMADOL_Buy_Cheap_Tramadol_Online
Ideally, I'd like to use XPath to query the structure for the node to
be appended onto another document. But I don't want to have to resort
to searching line by line for the node I need as it may not at the
speed in which I seek. However, I'm open to other suggestions.

Thanks
Dominc