I've been working on a little content managment system for a small site. It's pretty much just a test of ideas. Very basic stuff, login, post a message, message appears on main page, etc. What i've been thinking about is what the better *setup* would be.

Either keep all the required data (user name, the block of text, etc) in database.

Or

Keep only some of the data in the db, while the possibly big blocks of text will be stored as seperate files (storing the name of the file in the db).

So what do you guys think? Advice, opinions are all welcome!

cools

Putting all of your data in a database has the advantage of allowing you to control user access using the database's security mechanism instead of relying on lame *nix filesystem permissions. Definitely a better security model.

Given the choice between flat files and a database I almost always choose the database. If you do flat files you'll have to write all the code for querying, modifying, and adding data to the flat files... something the database does quite nicely for free. No sense in re-inventing the wheel.

True dat!

I was just think of the character size for the text to store. In the db i'd need to cap it, while if i store the text in a flat file i can make it any size, yet that would mean writing my own functions for modifying those files.

not true, on MySQL the TEXT and BLOB datatypes can be enormous, i think the total maximum is 4GB but in practice it is less than this, but still massive. certanly larger than anyone will type as a message.

According to the MySQL documentation, a LONGBLOB or LONGTEXT field has a maximum length of 4GB (well, one byte less than that actually.)

If your concern is the physical size of the resulting
tables then I can give you some good & friendly
information (at least if the data base in question
is postgres, don't know how mysql handles that).
In PostgreSQL blob's and other large objects
aren't stored in a table consuming vast amounts
of storage for non-allocated data. Rather, PG puts
a flat file in the filesystems, and stores access
parameters to it in the data base table :)

Cheers,
Tink

P.S.: PostgreSQL rocks ;)