Gaggio,

We all know that there is a right tool for the right job, and flat files will be of great help for most storing small amounts of data. But seriously, after having worked for 2 years ONLY with flatfiles, I would never, EVER, recommend to anyone doing the approach just mentioned above. There is no telling how much "Just improving a little" your data will require in the future, and that could bring you down to your knees with maintanance in a short while.

BTW: there is NO WAY that you will get faster access from a flatfile (or series of them) than from a real DBMS. Expensive DBMS's like Oracle, Informix, DB2, et al will even keep most accessed data in RAM to avoid going to disk for frequent queries. Sure, you can do that with perl too, but you're not talking about 'just' flatfiles anymore.

Please reconsider your advice, there are tools and tools for each job, and I don't think flatfiles will keep you running as smoothly as you think.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

In reply to The (lack of) POWER of flat files by BBQ
in thread DBI vs MLDBM/GDBM_File, etc. by ZZamboni

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