Basically, I’m still working on a puzzle-related website (micro-site really), and I’m making a tool that lets you input a word pattern (e.g. “r??n”) and get all the matching words (in this case: rain, rein, ruin, etc.). Should I store the words in local text files (such as words5.txt, which would have a return-delimited list of 5-letter words), or in a database (such as the table Words5, which would again store 5-letter words)?
I’m looking at the problem in terms of data retrieval speeds and CPU server load. I could definitely try it both ways and record the times taken for several runs with both methods, but I’d rather hear it from people who might have had experience with this.
Which method is generally better overall?
For fast retrieval you certainly want some kind of index. If you don’t want to write index code yourself, it’s certainly easiest to use a database.
If you are using Java or .NET for your app, consider looking into db4o. It just stores any object as is with a single line of code and there are no setup costs for creating tables.