Posted by ircmaxell on 01/22/07 10:20

Well, I wound up redesigning the program anyway, and what a speed
difference!!! I went to an almost completely database system (I still
write a bunch of files, but I don't read any of them). The page load
went from .93 seconds to .24 seconds... The file read portion went
from .36 seconds to (are you ready?) a measly .00023 seconds using the
database... WOW!!! You can say that is a little difference...

On Dec 19 2006, 3:29 pm, Ivan Marsh <anno...@you.now> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:59:29 -0800, juss...@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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