What is the best way to access/modify a large database/spreadsheet?

I am working on a sports management/sim game like football manager and I would like to know how to go about storing & reading/writing the large no. of details involved like the player name, bio, salary, rating etc and how to perform calculations on certain values and also update them as (in-game) time goes. From the research I've done so far, XML serializing seems to be the way to go, but I would like to know if there are any other methods for doing this?

By chance if XML Serializing is the way to go, can you provide me any other useful links other than the "MonsterContainer" one present in the many threads?

 

There's always MSDN's Examples of XML Serialization for a more "official" set of examples.

If it's a truly large database, you might use a dedicated SQL database. Search for "SQL" on the Unity Asset Store.