[duncanwilcox]

Clearly stackexchange is showing pro-db bias. I'm a huge fan of unstructured data in filesystems as well, that's how the service behind my prototypesapp.com is built.

I also happen to think MySQL-backed websites are the bane of the internet, further testament to the pro-db bias of the average web developer.

A properly built sql store (or, increasingly, nosql) is definitely a necessity for large service. But what is "large"?

I once heard the rule of thumb that a db is necessary when the size of the data you store in it becomes larger than the size of the db code. I kind of like it.

[kawsper]

It really depends on your structure I think. In the days of PHP3 I saw a lot of developers that built .txt-backed websites, with complicated parsing that would break when you looked at it.

In my opinion, they would have been better of with a database, or a more clever design like yours probably is.

A lot of my first work was rewriting PHP3 sites that used text-files to PHP4 with MySQL. Some of them had 200mb articles in text-files, and for every request they parsed this file, and didn't know why it was slow.

[betterunix]

Unstructured data is as bad as unstructured code. Typically, your data will become more complex over time, and structure helps a lot with ensuring that this is not a painful thing to do. Relational databases are well-studied and present a well-understood abstraction, with design patterns (normal forms) that significantly improve the maintainability of databases. Sure, relational DBs are not the only solution; I personally find Lisp s-expressions to be an easier to use Q&D store (of course, I am also a Lisp programmer, and most of my code does not have to deal with untrusted data), and lots of people are using YAML these days (and of course, there is XML).

[asveikau]

> Clearly stackexchange is showing pro-db bias.

If the question is "why use a database", don't you expect pro-DB answers?