Are there any real benefits to using a RDBMS vs. flat files on a simple Web doc system (or basic CMS)?

Question

The Project

I\'ve been asked to work on an interesting project -- what amounts to a basic Web CMS -- that uses HTML/CSS/jQuery with PHP. However, on

Answer 1

It's a shame you can't use CouchDB, this seems like the perfect application for it. Keep in mind that using flat-files severely constrains your architecture and, especially, scalability.

What's the best case scenario for your CMS app? It's successful and people want to use it more? If you're using flat-files it'll be harder to service and improve your system (e.g. make it more robust, and add new features for future versions) and performance will not scale well. So "success" in this case is at best short-lived, as success translates into more and more work for less and less gains in feature-set and performance.