Why bother with a database if ...

if for example you have a large number of records that you just need to store once and then read them sequentially once. We collect sessions from a network, aprox a million per day. These session records are the input to a process which looks up additional information based on the content of the session record. There does not seem to be any reason to dump these session records into a database table just so that we can sequentially processing them through the system. Or is there?

The only possible reason I could come up with is maybe, if we had multiple CPU's and the table was spread over many disks, that a parallel query might actually be faster than a sequential read of a flat file.

Possible?

Is there sometimes when a good ol' flat file is a better choice than a database?

Thought and reflections greatly appreciated. thanks,
Mike
Not an actual Oracle Certified DBA, but an incredible simulation! Received on Mon Sep 18 2000 - 22:33:14 CDT