Am I being a reputable professional if I give in to these demands?
I don't think that's a sensible question. What's your role in the entire project? There's a big difference whether you're just a junior code monkey in a team of 50, with tech leads and architects, or whether you basically carry the entire project, and it's your ass that's on fire when a third party runs off with the clients, or worse, the banks money. And what you haven't discussed at all is the sensibility of the data you are serving. Since you are talking about files, this smells like static data. Which may have data of only limited sensibility. There's a big difference between an application that lets a customer move a million dollars from one account to another, and a application that shows teenagers the amount of money in their checking account.

So therefore.. what should be my main authority on users, the db or the filesystem?
Probably the database, but to be sure, one needs to know what filesystem and what database. Most databases care a lot more about data than most filesystems, but some databases trade reliability for speed, and some filesystems trade speed for reliability.
Perl --((8:>*

In reply to Re: Where to get this kindof advice. by Perl Mouse
in thread Where to get this kindof advice. by jpsartre

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