Databases versus plain text

Question

When dealing with small projects, what do you feel is the break even point for storing data in simple text files, hash tables, etc., versus using a real database? For small

Answer 1

I would only write my own on-disk format under very special circumstances. Reusing someone else's code is nearly always faster.

For relational data, I would use SQLite. For key/value pairs, I would use BerkeleyDB (perhaps via KiokuDB). For simple objects, I would use JSON or YAML, but only if I only had a few.

With SQLite and BDB, "a real database" is literally two lines of code away. It is hard to beat that.