Question

WordPress, for example, has a table with name => value rows for storing application-wide settings (the name of the blog, comments settings, etc.). Please note that I’m referring to settings that may be modified often during normal use of the application.

I understand why WordPress does it like that (portability: it’s easy to copy the entire database to another blog and retain settings), but is there a better way to do it for smaller applications?

I know that many frameworks, like Zend Framework for example, have a configuration file with application-wide configuration settings. Why not just dynamically modify that file at runtime to save my settings? To me, this has several advantages over database settings storage:

• Less database use
• Settings are easily human-editable over FTP without needing a MySQL shell or phpMyAdmin instance
• Settings files can easily be backed up and restored

On the other hand, the biggest complication I can think of is that of concurrency. The file will need to be locked while changes are being made.

What is the preferred way?

Answer 1

DB table advantages

• Settings are global to all web servers sharing the same database. No need for file replication/network file system
• The application most likely already uses database, no extra setup
• No dependencies on file system
• Easier to cache (maybe there is already some generic DB caching layer?)
• Handles concurrency
• The application may already have a framework or a way to handle CRUD of any database table (creating GUI is easy)
• Transparent backup with the rest of your application
• Can be strongly typed if you have several value columns of different types used exclusively

…and disadvantages

• you need a tool or SQL knowledge to maintain it
• might have a worse performance