The question "what is faster, MySQL or flat files" is meaningless. What is faster, a car or ship? That would depend on where you are going. Over land, a car is usually faster, but over water, a ship tends to be faster.

Which of MySQL and flat files is faster depends on what you are going to do. If it's mainly adding data, and there's not much querying going on, flat files might be a lot faster - you'd just add the information to the end. If your data is very stable, and you need to do complex queries, MySQL will win. If you have a lot of concurrent access, MySQL might win, but sometimes, flat files will win. If you do a lot of queries, where most of the time half or more of the data is needed for the result, flat files will probably faster. If you are doing a lot of random deletes, MySQL is probably faster, specially if you have the right indices. If you just have 50 rows, who cares what is faster.

I want to start out by going the fastest route before it gets too late.

But before you can answer the question what is the fastest route, you first have to determine what kind of data you are dealing with, how and how often the data changes, and which kinds of queries you have to perform, and what their frequencies are.

Abigail