I'm looking for some opinions on storing configuration data in a database versus in a file.

I notice that the majority of programs I've used seem to have a lot of their preferences and configuration settings stored in a file. Especially when dealing with PHP. But it would seem to me that if you're using a relational database and you're already making a connection to the database to serve a page or anything else, then why not suck your configuration information out of a config table?

Currently, I place a line near the top of my program that does a selectrow_hashref() to grab configuration data. The only configuration settings outside of the database are placed in the script itself, and that's just the connect() line.

I've been considering using Config::IniFiles, instead. That might be overkill, though. Should I really use all of that extra code instead of the simple one selectall_hashref?

Or, are there other suggestions?

In reply to Storing config data - RDBMS vs File? by Seumas

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