Question

I am starting new project. In my project I will need to use local provinces and local city names. I do not want to have many mysql tables unless I have to have or csv is fast. For province-city case I am not sure which one to use.

I have job announcements related with cities, provinces. For Csv case I will keep the name of city in announcements table, so when I do search I send selected city name to db in query.

can anyone give me better idea on how to do this? csv or mysql? why?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Database Pros

• Relating cities to provinces and job announcements will mean less redundant data, and consistently formatted data
• The ability to search/report data is much simpler, being [relatively] standardized by the use of SQL
• More scalable, accommodating GBs of data if necessary
• Infrastructure is already in place, well documented in online resources

Flat File (CSV) Pros

I’m trying, but I can’t think of any. Reading from a csv means loading the contents into memory, whether the contents will be used or not. As astander mentioned, changes while the application is in use would be a nightmare. Then there’s the infrastructure to pull data out, searching, etc.

Conclusion

Use a database, be it MySQL or the free versions of Oracle or SQL Server. Basing things off a csv is coding yourself into a corner, with no long term benefits.