As a general rule, databases are slower than files.
If you require indexing of your files, a hard-coded access path on customised indexing structures will always have the potential to be faster if you do it correctly.
But 'performance' is not the goal when choosing a database over a file based solution.
You should ask yourself whether your system needs any of the benefits that a database would provide. If so, then the small performance overhead is quite acceptable.
So:
- Do you need to deal with multiple users and concurrent updates? (Well; you did say it's static.)
- Do you need flexibility in order to easily query the data from a variety of angles?
- Do you have multiple users, and could gain from making use of an existing security model?
Basically, the question is more of which would be easier to develop. The performance difference between the two is not worth wasting dev time.
