Bangalore .Net User Group

Hi,
Using ASP.Net 2.0, SQL Server 2005 we are developing a portal.
Portal features include forum and articles and many others.

With respect to forums and articles, which is the best practice, whether store the data in the SQL Server 2005 or in XML files?

Thanks!
Som

somayajulu:

With respect to forums and articles, which is the best practice, whether store the data in the SQL Server 2005 or in XML files?

Database is much better if you talking in large number of members.
Secondly think about how will you design it. Stacking all in one large table is silly idea. Your database should consist of number of tables specifically designed for certain task. For example user_data_table to store user details where each each user can be identify by unique ID. Then you can use this ID in others tables for example forum_posts. This will have unique ID for each post but also hold used ID as foreign key to associate post with user.

XML has a huge overhead in the textual naming of the entities. Also it is not meant to be humad readable, it is a transport medium. Store the data in a database, the DB overheads will be trivial compared to XML and the disk use will be much less.

Anyways if you can store data in DB also you can create RSS Feed from MS SQL records and syndicate to users!!!..

Source: daniweb.com

also for more details : http://www.gcn.com/print/24_6/35285-1.html?topic=interview&page=2

somayajulu:

With respect to forums and articles, which is the best practice, whether store the data in the SQL Server 2005 or in XML files?

It depends. 

When you host on a shared hosting, obviously you will have more disk space limit than database limit. In that case XML files would be easy and your database won't grow as fast. You need to keep some information on database to locate the XML files.

If you have dedicated server, probably you won't be limited with space. So go with SQL server.

tekexplore:

Database is much better if you talking in large number of members.

There won't be much difference if all the users are just reading the data. Read lock will be supplied to multiple users. There would be some issues when multiple users write to same file at same time. 

navaneeth:

There would be some issues when multiple users write to same file at same time. 

yes you are right!......but there exits many multi user applications with DB as backend e.g.All forums and CMS are maintained by DB as backend !...do they have such problem!.....I want to know so that I can correct it .......Then what Transaction Manager does in those cases!...does the DB crashes!...