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Asked: 2026-05-30T01:55:23+00:00

First Some Background I’m planning out the architecture for a new PHP web application

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First Some Background

I’m planning out the architecture for a new PHP web application and trying to make it as easy as possible to install. As such, I don’t care what web server the end user is running so long as they have access to PHP (setting my requirement at PHP5).

But the app will need some kind of database support. Rather than working with MySQL, I decided to go with an embedded solution. A few friends recommended SQLite – and I might still go that direction – but I’m hesitant since it needs additional modules in PHP to work.

Remember, the aim is easy of installation … most lay users won’t know what PHP modules their server has or even how to find their php.ini file, let alone enable additional tools.

My Current Objective

So my current leaning is to go with a filesystem-based data store. The "database" would be a folder, each "table" would be a specific subfolder, and each "row" would be a file within that subfolder. For example:

/public_html
    /application
        /database
            /table
                1.data
                2.data
            /table2
                1.data
                2.data

There would be other files in the database as well to define schema requirements, relationships, etc. But this is the basic structure I’m leaning towards.

I’ve been pretty happy with the way Microsoft built their Open Office XML file format (.docx/.xlsx/etc). Each file is really a ZIP archive of a set of XML files that define the document.

It’s clean, easy to parse, and easy to understand.

I’d like to actually set up my directory structure so that /database is really a ZIP archive that resides on the server – a single, portable file.

But as the data store grows in size, won’t this begin to affect performance on the server? Will PHP need to read the entire archive in to memory to extract it and read its composite files?

What alternatives could I use to implement this kind of file structure but still make it as portable as possible?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sqlite is enabled by default since PHP5 so most all PHP5 users should have it.

    I think there will be tons of problems with the zip approach, for example adding a file to a relatively large zip archive is very time consuming. I think there will be horrible concurrency and locking issues.

    Reading zip files requires a php extension anyway, unless you went with a pure PHP solution. The downside is most php solutions WILL want to read the whole zip into memory, and will also be way slower than something that is written in C and compiled like the zip extension in PHP.

    I’d choose another approach, or make SQLite/MySQL a requirement. If you use PDO for PHP, then you can allow the user to choose SQLite or MySQL and your code is no different as far as issuing queries. I think 99%+ of webhosts out there support MySQL anyway.

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