Does PHP + XML have any advantages over PHP + MySQL?

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Does PHP + XML have any advantages over PHP + MySQL?

Mr_Initial_Man

The info is going to be added to, but not changed around a lot. And XML can be stored as a text file and directly uploaded, while with MySQL, it seems a bit more complicated to edit it--and keep a mirror site current with the main one.

tracknut

That depends largely on the scale of your project. If by "edit the database" you mean "get into a text editor and make changes", and "keep a mirror site current" you mean "periodically make a copy" then yes, those things seem pretty simple. But making changes to a database through an editor isn't usually how a large application will access a database, and implementing MySQL replication is likely much more robust than a periodic ftp of the file. And all this doesn't even touch the power of the SQL language over the tools available for manipulating XML.

That said, I do have a site I've implemented with many large XML files rather than a database, and I'm happy with how it works.

Dave

NogDog

Personally, I'd always go with the database approach, except in the absolute simplest and smallest of situations where I'm positive it's never going to scale up to a case where I'll be sorry I didn't make it a database to begin with. A DB also gives you many more options for efficiently selecting, grouping, and sorting your data on the fly, while with an XML approach you'd have to do all those things in your PHP code using SimpleXML or DOM methods, various array functions and so forth: much less efficiently than a properly configured DB could do it, especially as the data set grows.

Mr_Initial_Man

Well, my biggest frustration with databases is some of the pictures that are on my site have REALLY long descriptions, and using the text fields can be a pain. I figured, if I'm gonna have a text file, I might as well keep the whole shebang in that file.

NogDog

Mr Initial Man;1270581 wrote:
Well, my biggest frustration with databases is some of the pictures that are on my site have REALLY long descriptions, and using the text fields can be a pain. I figured, if I'm gonna have a text file, I might as well keep the whole shebang in that file.

I may well be missing a piece of the puzzle here, but I don't see where text size matters -- unless you're talking about editing text in phpMyAdmin or similar? If that's the issue, I would just build a simple admin/maintenance form with textarea fields of whatever size I want.

I suspect there's a comfort-level thing here, too, perhaps, as I know you've done a lot of stuff with XML/XHTML. I work with database stuff in PHP every day, so it's pretty second nature to me now. I may use text files (often JSON) for fairly static things such as configuration files; but for anything where I want to store, search, retrieve, and organize data, it's databases all the way for me.

Mr_Initial_Man

Well, yeah--editing text and markup in phpMyAdmin is what I've been doing. Right now, my website is kind of a mix of XML and MySQL--XML for the text, MySQL for the rest

epricity

XML is very useful, if you're doing data mining. It's a good interchange format. There's near universal support for it. It's great for pushing or getting information to and from other places. Like if you're using Soap Client, or aggregating/consuming RSS feeds. For those kinds of uses, it's often easier and more secure to use xml for your data. I wouldn't use it locally if I'm not dumping or consuming dumps of data because it has more overhead on the app server side of things, and I wouldn't want my site to be slower than it absolutely needs to be. If I was using xml as a back end for a website, I would use some kind of caching system, so the site performs a little better, and you don't need to do the heavy lifting every time a page loads.

rossytzoltan

Go with the MySQL database. Every day of the week.