Since everyone is coming down on flat-files, I figure its about time for me to come to their defense.

Relational Databasese are great for most types of data storage. Particilarly when the data will be accessed randomly, when you need something that will maintain atomic transactions and referential integrity for you, and having the physucal data-structure abstracted for you. However, there are several occasions when you can't beat the speed and convenience of flat-files:

  1. data files that only need to be appended to and are read infrequently or sequentially. It is almost always faster to append a line to a flat file than adding a row to a DB table; there is no overhead of creating index entries, etc....
  2. data files that only need to be accessed sequentially and completely, never randomly.
Also if your data is strongly heirarchical you could be better off using a heirarchical datastore, such as your computer's filesystem.

In reply to RE: The POWER of flat files by lhoward
in thread DBI vs MLDBM/GDBM_File, etc. by ZZamboni

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.