Posted by Ivan Marsh on 12/19/06 20:29

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:59:29 -0800, jussist@gmail.com wrote:

> Usually when in need to compare which is faster, I tend to think that in
> the very end databases are just flat files. The only difference between
> real flat files and database is the database software, which has been
> built to optimize, among other things, the speed of quering of the data.

If you disregard all of the fundamentals of database design...
normalization, index optimization, etc.

A flat file can be very fast as long as you're talking about a very small
file. At the point the overhead of the database server matches the access
time of the flat file based on its size the database server will always be
faster... assuming your database isn't designed like a flat file (which it
shouldn't be).

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