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I recommend that all developers should at least once try to write a web app that uses plain files for data storage. I’ve done it, and I very quickly realized w

I recommend that all developers should at least once try to write a web app that uses plain files for data storage. I’ve done it, and I very quickly realized why databases exist, and not to take them for granted.

sedatk 4y ago
Exactly. I'd written my now popular web app (most popular Turkish social platform to date) as a Delphi CGI using text files as data store in 99 because I wanted to get it running ASAP, and I thought BDE would be quite cumbersome to get running on a remote hosting service. (Its original source that uses text files is at https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi) I immediately started to have problems as expected, and later migrated to an Access DB. It didn't support concurrent writes, but it was an improvement beyond comprehension. Even "orders of magnitude" doesn't cut it because you get many more luxuries than performance like data-type consistency, ACID compliance, relational integrity, SQL and whatnot.
- akamaka 4y ago
  What made my implementation disastrous turned out to be that there was no enforcement of string encodings, and users started to see all kinds of garbled text.
  - sedatk 4y ago
    One of my best decisions was to start out ASCII-only. It helped me manage that mess longer. :)
kcartlidge 4y ago
> write a web app that uses plain files for data storage ... very quickly realized why databases exist, and not to take them for granted You haven't lived until you've built an in-memory database with background threads persisting to JSON files. Oh, the nightmares.