With a database you generally are loading it into RAM, thanks to caching at the database and/or filesystem level, and you get all of the fun database features m

With a database you generally are loading it into RAM, thanks to caching at the database and/or filesystem level, and you get all of the fun database features more or less for free. There's a performance hit relative to skipping the database altogether and simply allocating 4GB of RAM and accessing it directly, of course.