28.4. When to Store Content in a Database
When I speak of content, I mean static text, perhaps containing HTML. There is no rule saying that content should never be placed in a database or that it should always be put in a database. In the case of a bulletin board, it makes sense to put each message in a database. Messages are likely to be added continually. It is convenient to treat them as units, manipulating them by their creation dates or authors. At the other extreme, a copyright message that appears at the bottom of every page of a site is more suited to a text file that is retrieved with the require function.
Somewhere between these two extremes is a break-even point. The reason is that databases provide a tradeoff. They allow you to handle ...
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