Question

I am working on a project in which I need sync RSS feed from the url given by user. Then show the feed content in our css on the user page. There is mobile site involve, so i dont want to sync again and again when user open up the mobile site for the performance reason. I need to keep the content in some storage. What can be the best storage for keeping such large data (Data can be large based on the RSS feed content). I am using the MySQL DBMS. Can I store this data in database or should I adopt file system or some other storage media is available for these types of data. What should be the best practice as the user database can be too large.

Answer 1

If using the database to store files is more convenient than the file system for your needs, you can definitely do it. Neither solution is absolutely better than the other, but MySQL offers some benefits over the file system:

• If you have a large amount of files, you’ll need to split them into separate directories is you use the file system.
• MySQL allows replication to multiple servers if you need load balancing.
• You don’t need separate file retrieval code when you can get the files directly from the database with the same query you get the other results.

For very large amounts of files, you may want to look into distributed filesystems. I have used and liked MogileFS, but there are many others available as well. These allow you to distribute your files over as many servers as you like and are much more fault tolerant than the other solutions.