How to read file content into istringstream?

In order to improve performance reading from a file, I'm trying to read the entire content of a big (several MB) file into memory and then use a istringstream to access the information.

My question is, which is the best way to read this information and "import it" into the string stream? A problem with this approach (see bellow) is that when creating the string stream the buffers gets copied, and memory usage doubles.

#include <fstream>
#include <sstream>

using namespace std;

int main() {
  ifstream is;
  is.open (sFilename.c_str(), ios::binary );

  // get length of file:
  is.seekg (0, std::ios::end);
  long length = is.tellg();
  is.seekg (0, std::ios::beg);

  // allocate memory:
  char *buffer = new char [length];

  // read data as a block:
  is.read (buffer,length);

  // create string stream of memory contents
  // NOTE: this ends up copying the buffer!!!
  istringstream iss( string( buffer ) );

  // delete temporary buffer
  delete [] buffer;

  // close filestream
  is.close();

  /* ==================================
   * Use iss to access data
   */

}