s0da — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 19:32:02 +0000

do you mean like a chatterbox type thing? that can easily be stored in SQL .. much better than flat-file.

Greg K — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 19:10:56 +0000

Since it was said "or as part of the database", I think what was being asked is if the actual conversation should be stored in the database, or in a text file and maybe have the database point to that filename.

The pro to having it part of the database is that then you don't have to worry about creating filenames, etc and where to store them.

Now, if you have the database on a different server than the web server, then (depending on how big the files are), there could be some speed difference haivng the files saved as text files on the web server as the program would not have to pull all of the data across from another server, just a link to a file that is on the same web server.

-Greg

zollet — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 05:58:17 +0000

I don't believe there are any pros for using text file databases. They're slow, unreliable and eat all your server resources.