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

For bioinformatics you may be interested on that: Blast on DB. The guy who is working on that is a friend of mine and has a work on fast similarity sequence search, he found out to make his own binary storage better than using databases at this point.

I don't know specific details about his solution but you probably can exchange one or two ideias mailing the guy, even sharing code.