Well, let's see. A text file would be theoretically limited to the size of your hard drive. Databases often include low-level technology to cross multiple hard drives with RAID. I've seen databases in the hundreds of Terabytes (1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes)...
More practically, a search through a text file would be linear. Searches through databases are optimized with indices to be logarithmic or better...
Also, a database can be run on a different machine from your
servlet. This allows you to take advantage of the processing power of two machines. With a text file, well, your're kind of stuck there...
Kyle
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Kyle Brown,
Author of
Enterprise Java (tm) Programming with IBM Websphere
See my homepage at
http://members.aol.com/kgb1001001 for other WebSphere information.