Timeline for Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 31, 2021 at 4:27 | comment | added | Myster | Scalability of what? data-size? sure, writes? probably, reads?... a small enough data-set should scale to lots of reads. | |
| Sep 13, 2020 at 19:38 | comment | added | Kid101 | I think that storing telemetry data (which is not required immediately, probably EOD) to blob storage/ file system is much cheaper and can easily be processed by ELT job later when required is a good use case. | |
| Jun 16, 2020 at 10:01 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Apr 5, 2020 at 10:44 | comment | added | Sergey Bushmanov | The necessity to access and edit the same data at the same time may be another reason to go for RDBMS. | |
| Mar 10, 2020 at 10:56 | comment | added | JonasH | The use of "unstructured" could be confusing. Both NoSQL and files can store data structures just fine (Json for example), but has limited possibility to query data or refer to data outside the structure. | |
| May 19, 2013 at 13:11 | comment | added | gbjbaanb | Of course, "embedded" databases like sqlite and web storage blur the lines between using a DB and using a file, you have the ease of a file and the power of SQL all at the same time. I can't see the point of writing your own file-content read/write system when someone's already done it for you, and done it way better. | |
| May 19, 2013 at 7:44 | comment | added | Eamon Nerbonne | @MartinBeckett: which filesystem of the past decade does that? | |
| Mar 17, 2013 at 3:41 | comment | added | Abe | Do your rules for binary files apply to heirarchical data formats like netCDF and HDF? Where do these fit in? They seem to work more like databases than binary files, but then I really don't know anything about how information in other binary files is used. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 20:48 | comment | added | Bratch | Good mention of binary data and RDBMS instead of just database (explained for those still learning here, for SQL Server - youtube.com/watch?v=bXbm0qGwgAw). Sometimes a simple JSON/XML/INI file is good enough. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 19:48 | comment | added | Martin Beckett | @GoranJovic it sometimes makes sense. Store 10,000+ images in a directory and some filesystems will grind to a halt - a DB might be easier than a manual sub-directory partition scheme. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 11:17 | history | edited | Sam | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 123 characters in body
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| Mar 14, 2013 at 11:16 | comment | added | Sam | Well, there was never any explicit mention made to it being a web app but I did infer it from the JSON comment. However, sometimes something will only be used by a few people and you can justify the scope of the application to not worry about scalability and reliability. By this I mean, not worrying about things such as clustering and redundancy. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 11:15 | comment | added | John M Gant | Good answer, but when would a web application not need to at least be thinking ahead about scalability? And why would any real application not need to think about reliability? | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 9:46 | comment | added | Goran Jovic | You could add another example to your third list: When data actually is files, e.g. uploaded images, pdf documents and such. It may seem obvious but I did see cases where images were stored in a database blob for no good reason whatsoever. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 4:13 | comment | added | GrandmasterB | +1, I think its important that you pointed out there's times when files actually are suitable for storage. | |
| Mar 14, 2013 at 3:07 | history | answered | Sam | CC BY-SA 3.0 |