Some thoughts: "If you use your file system as a "database" you can ask it questions too with file paths" You'll be much more limited in the kind of queries y

Some thoughts: "If you use your file system as a "database" you can ask it questions too with file paths" You'll be much more limited in the kind of queries you can reasonably make. You'll have to decide on them ahead of time. This might be what you want, but it might not. "Denormalization makes this unnecessary." Denormalization means making your data match your application rather than the other way around. You can make stuff faster this way sometimes, but again, you're limiting the kinds of queries and access patterns you can make in the future. "It's important to note, this only matters if your data is not immutable. There are many applications where this is the case, but also many where it is not." Wouldn't a flat file which continually accrued immutable data technically be called a log? You can do analysis on flat log files, but it will get slow if your files are sufficiently large. Indexing can help here. "CDNs have shown that files can scale even better. Again immutability is a constraint but I think it's an interesting constraint to explore for many systems." What? CDNs improve performance by placing the point of origin for data physically closer to the client, thus reducing lag. What does this have to do with the difference between files and databases? Do you mean that static or cached webpages serve faster and use fewer resources than ones generated from sql queries at the time of request? Duh, but that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.