In my experience, databases (well, good databases, not toy things like MySQL) are far more reliable than file systems. Sure, your database could not be available, but so could your filesystem. And your database will not corrupt your configuration data if your application dies halfway writing the configuration file. Rest assured that anything based on doing simple write(2)s will happily leave your data in a corrupt state if the application dies halfway. Or worse, if the application dies after thinking it finished writing the data (but alas, some of it was still in a buffer somewhere).

Using your filesystem instead of a database for reliability is like "going to war for peace" or "fucking for virginity". Larry Ellison wouldn't be as rich as he is now if filesystems were as reliable as databases.

The ideal would be to have some sort of High Availability Db server in place, but that infrastructure doesn't currently exist. Tell, you do at least have a HA filesystem? And your application itself is running in a cluster? Otherwise, all you will be doing is window dressing.

In reply to Re^5: Configuration Files by Anonymous Monk
in thread Configuration Files by Mutant

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