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. 