Flatfile vs RDBMS

Anon

Except for the obvious benefit of relations and ease-of-use of SQL, what are the advantages of using an RDBMS like MySQL or Postgresql instead of flat textfiles? For simpler jobs, like guestbooks, malinglists, discussion forums etc, wich don't really need much locking capabilities, it seems it would add unnessecary overhead using an RDBMS. Isn't it faster to file() a textfile and search and output the array, than fetching from a table with an SQL statement?

/BiLL.

Anon

Hi Bill,

Your stated question implies that you require some benefit OTHER than ease of use, standardized SQL, and relations. I use SQL databases in preference to flat files, because in my case it's easier to to manipulate SQL databases than flat files.

I regularly use MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and the PHP Base Library.
http://mysql.he.net
http://www.phpwizard.net/phpMyAdmin/
http://phplib.netuse.de/
The combination of relational database, friendly GUI interace to same, and easy, object-oriented access to the data, actually makes it easier, quicker, and more convenient to create database-enabled appliations than to create flat file apps. If you haven't already given the above applications a look, you owe it to yourself to try them out.

Best regards,

Mike McCafferty

Anon

With all the built-in features for RDBMS that php offers. In my opinion using a relational databases is not only easier and much faster to code than trying to open a text file every time you want to read or wriet anything.

Anon

There are really three answers you should look at depending on how fast you need your site to run on how little horsepower.

Flat text files are by far the faster solution. For things like guest logs or quotes of the day they are very fast and easy to do. I prefer text files for things that don't have to be complex like an autogenerated index.php3 page, but need to be fast. PHP can generate dynamic page content from text files at many hundreds of kilobytes per second on most any web server, and as fast as several megabytes a second on some fast servers running simple scripts.

The slowest but most versatile would be a full fledged RDBMS, like postgres, mySQL, or Oracle. While these offer great versatility, you do pay in performance. Most advanced db apps run a few k per second output maximum, but this is fine, since it lets us manipulate out data in any way we need, with minimum reprogramming.

But the in between solution is gdbms! These simple little hash tables are very fast, allow us to store our data in a simple non relational database and get it back fast.

They don't provide any real locking, just like flat files, but are much better for long lists of things that need to be accessed quickly and without the pain and heartache of trying to make your own db functions in php and a text file.