I want to start out by going the fastest route before it gets too late.īut before you can answer the question what is the fastest If you just have 50 rows, who cares what is faster. If you are doing a lot of random deletes, MySQL is probablyįaster, specially if you have the right indices.

Is needed for the result, flat files will probably faster. If you do a lot of queries, where most of the time half or more of the data If you have a lot of concurrent access, MySQL might win,īut sometimes, flat files will win. Very stable, and you need to do complex queries, MySQL will You'd just add the information to the end. Much querying going on, flat files might be a lot faster. If it's mainly adding data, and there's not Which of MySQL and flat files is faster depends on what youĪre going to do. Over land, a car is usuallyįaster, but over water, a ship tends to be faster. What is faster, a car or ship? That wouldĭepend on where you are going. The question 'what is faster, MySQL or flat files' is meaningless. Think about what you're doing (and what you're likely to want to do with your program in the future) and make the appropriate decision.

Although it's true that MySQL builds its internal data structures on top of whatever file system it's in, it gets HUGE speed advantages over flatfiles from the proper use of indexes, allowing you to get to just the data you need without having to search through every file in the database. 'Give me all the files for User X, created between January and March, that have to do with 'Foo'') then you should just go ahead and do the relational database tango and use MySQL. On the other hand, if there are multiple files per user, or you want to slice and dice the data in different ways (i.e. For example, if you have one file per user, and each file is named after the user, and the only thing your program will ever do for User X is access File X, then flat files will be quicker. Yes there's some overhead for DBI connections, but unless your program can access particular files by name (that is, your program is given a specific file to access without having to do any searching) then MySQL is going to definitely be faster.

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Relational database vs flat file