To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail -- I am guilty of that sometimes in applying databases to problems. :) I guess I would ask a few questions about your data, positive answers to which might lead me to prefer a database over plain text files:

• Is there a lot of data?
• Is the data scattered across multiple systems/platforms?
• Does the data lend itself to aggregation or categorization?
• Is the data more transient than I would prefer?
• Are the rules to parse the data complex?
• Is the server on which the data resides used for other mission-critical operations?
• ... and so on

If the answers to these questions are all 'no', then there may be no benefit to adding yet another database. But if any of the answers are 'yes', then you may see considerable benefit in terms of performance, reliability, maintainability, etc. Just a few thoughts. I've done this a couple of times and I have never (yet) said to myself, "Dang, I wish I had just done this with files." Maybe that just demonstrates that I am stubborn. :)

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