4 ms·

If you need to store to disk at all, use a DB. The exceptions being if you have very small amounts of data or it is not a big deal if its lost (like user prefer

If you need to store to disk at all, use a DB. The exceptions being if you have very small amounts of data or it is not a big deal if its lost (like user preferences or similar). You could just serialize those to flat files. DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O. At their very nature they are also designed with data integrity in mind. It would be a joke not to use one if you are handling important data where persistence is even remotely a factor. As you grow you'll be glad you implemented the DB code as it will scale much better. You'll also be able to do Analysis easier which can be very important in learning about usage of your product. But I'm definitely a fan of utilizing ram as much as is allowed in the interest of speed. Try to strike a good balance between data integrity and performance...

ido 20y ago
i accidentally down modded you instead of up modding, and now i can't reverse that action since the little arrows are gone- that comment's score is actually 2 points less then it should be.
dk 20y ago
"DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O." I think that's disputable. DBMSes are designed for a number of considerations and it's not hard to demonstrate how alternatives can outperform a DBMS in terms of disk I/O and general performance. Consider an HTTP request that modifies records. A typical DBMS-backed app will write all the changes to disk whereas a prevalent system (AKA object prevalence) need only write "POST /someurl arg1=value1:arg2=value2:..." or some equivalent. The data is updated in RAM with a write to only one or two disk sectors in the majority of cases, no communication with a DBMS, no construction and parsing of SQL, and none of the other overhead. A typical prevalent system will be orders of magnitude faster than the DBMS-backed equivalent, and simpler to boot. Object prevalence doesn't offer a query language and has different scalability considerations, but it would take an absurdly broken design for a DBMS to outperform it.

ido 20y ago

i accidentally down modded you instead of up modding, and now i can't reverse that action since the little arrows are gone- that comment's score is actually 2 points less then it should be.

dk 20y ago

"DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O." I think that's disputable. DBMSes are designed for a number of considerations and it's not hard to demonstrate how alternatives can outperform a DBMS in terms of disk I/O and general performance. Consider an HTTP request that modifies records. A typical DBMS-backed app will write all the changes to disk whereas a prevalent system (AKA object prevalence) need only write "POST /someurl arg1=value1:arg2=value2:..." or some equivalent. The data is updated in RAM with a write to only one or two disk sectors in the majority of cases, no communication with a DBMS, no construction and parsing of SQL, and none of the other overhead. A typical prevalent system will be orders of magnitude faster than the DBMS-backed equivalent, and simpler to boot. Object prevalence doesn't offer a query language and has different scalability considerations, but it would take an absurdly broken design for a DBMS to outperform it.