Database or File ?

rapbhan

Hi,

I have a doubt. Can anyone please clear me. I am having few html page contents. Also i am using a Database for some purpose. Now what i need to know is

Pulling a Information from Database or
Opening it from a file using require or include function

which one will be very fast.

Thanks you very much for your advice.

Looking forward for the reply.

Cheers,

Padmanabhan (Paddy)

ednark

include is fastest by far

however there may be other reasons you may want to use a database

BuzzLY

I can attest to the speed of includes. I have a page that I've created for testing purposes. between all the PHP includes, .js files, and .css files, There are 19 different files loading to create one web page. It's amazing how fast it is.

However, speed is usually not your only issue. It depends on whether you have dynamic data that needs to be loaded and possibly saved back to the database. If your site supports a lot of users, and you have the need to load and save data (especially relational data), then using a database is definitely the way to go.

There are things you can do to help speed up your database connection (such as persistent connections), but that is not really on-topic for this board.

Good Luck!

Elizabeth

So if you had a database field with simple text in it, such as a product description, do you think my product pages would be more efficient if I loaded them in to separate text files and called them up as needed with "include"?

Or is it "6 to one, half-dozen to the other" as we say...

-Elizabeth

ednark

for small amounts of data yes includes would be faster

if you have say 50 products... then it will be faster to do includes on them than to store each in the database...

however if you are already going into the database to pull out anyother information about the product.. might as well store the descition along with it... it seems to me it would be much more hassle to write code to update the product in the database, and also code to manage storing parts in a flatfile... with locking and existance and all...

if you put say 5000 files in one directory... then you will bottleneck at the operating system level... as you are asking the operating system (prob linux) to search the directory for a certain file... and it doesn't do this nearly as fast as sql searches tables as you can have upwards of a few million rows in a single sql table without sql having trouble with your request....

you could fix this by directory problem with acreative directory structure...

/products/a/b/abacus.php

so that each directory has less files in it... but that is besides the point

so either you have a very few number of products... and just live with your files... or don't bother and go Relational Database all the way... that would be my advise use mysql

BuzzLY

I concur... use text files only if you have a limited number of product descriptions, and they will not change over a long period of time. However, if the data will be changing, it will be much easier to manage if it's in database tables.