What are tha major benefits of the database approach?
Databases make backing up and restoring back ups easier. Most databases come with features that would be hard to implement from scratch using flat files – such as transaction management. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_tr… The alternative to using a database, using a flat file, requires that you create your own database to read and write data from your application. This is fine if the file contains only a few lines of configuration information but would be unwieldy over say 1 million customer records. Databases are optimised to access this data quickly. To compete with a database, you would need to put the same amount of effort into developing that part of your application as the development team put into building the database. In the cases of MySQL and Oracle, that is likely thousands of hours of work.
