Flat Files! Good Or Bad? Whats Your Opinion!

Flat files are useful to the extent you want to save the disk space to store them. But when it comes to the applications and abstracting out the useful information from the pile of lot of data it becomes too primitive and cumbersome. So for modern applications where disk space is not a problem flat files become not so useful. Besides these can not be used for purposes on which most of information storage is done. So if you are a beginner it is ok, but for advanced usage you need to rely on the systematic storage of the data.

Well I was going to take the flat file route but after all of the thought I finally decided to fully dwelve into the CMS field.

Now my view on flat files...I love them when it comes to un-changing information. For example a website about your hobby or something that you really won't change.

But if you have a site that will be changing, having information added, etc. I would suggest steering clear and just going with a CMS.

They are compact, if only for records, then there isn't need for fancy stuff.

But they may not be good for other purposes.

Flat files are great for certain kinds of data. For example, I have some large XML (gzipped) files that my web application uses to get tagged, meaningful data from. However, the site also uses a database to store user information and other data. Since the XML files only change about once a year (if that), there is no real problem keeping them like that.

However, with too many files, it is possible with a large site to hit the inode limit, disallowing you from making more files on the system. Also, databases do have a lot of useful features that can't be had from flat files (exploiting relationships between data for selection, for example).

So, each have their own uses, but, overall, I'd have to go with a database over flat files.

Regards,

z.

I think that flat file cms are not famous and well known. So if few users contribute on flat file based cms no user improvements will occur over time. I always liked databases and prefer Mysql. I am quite used to mysql queries. But maybe flat file cms take little size and bandwidth.

I am not sure, but databases are good because you can export them to different cpanels. Then flat files are not so popular, and so you have to invent by yourself lots of things, You need to be a good coder.

Hi!

My concern with flat files is write-concurrency. They offer good performance while reading though and if your file is your actual end markup, the web server can serve the file without any processing! WP-SuperCache does something similar for WordPress blogs.

Regards,
Nitin Reddy

"Flat flies good. Flat files bad." (kidding!)

This post has been edited by k_nitin_r: Jun 6 2009, 07:37 AM

I use a mixture of both flat files (in the form of static includes, for page formatting) and database (for, of all things, my error page, which uses detailed database info for reporting specifically on every error), depending on the criteria required. In my opinion, it's like comparing a pair of pliers to a wrench. You can use pliers (flat files) as a wrench (database), but it's clunky, and not the best tool for the job, most times. conversely, you can also use a wrench to do the same job that pliers do, at times, but it can be unwieldy to do. My main criteria is how static the data is, and if it's page structure (presentation) or data of some sort (content). It also depends on how hard it would be to code which way, and how lazy I'm feeling at the time.

No, they are a bad idea!

Hi!

I like the way Dave Morton puts it - you need to use what's best for the scenario at hand. If you've got heavy traffic on your website, using a database call several dozen times on a single page isn't really a good idea.

For data that rarely changes, if you can put together the data you need and write it to an HTML file on disk, you can use the static HTMLpages for the header and footer (with frames) - that would save you quite a bit of processing. Or you could just call a PHP script via AJAX on a static HTML page for the dynamic content while the less-frequently changing content is already written to the page.

For images, instead of storing the actual binary data in the database, you can store the file on disk and keep just the file name in the database. It saves you a lot of processing too.

Regards,
Nitin Reddy