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

Use whatever persistence technology you're most comfortable with, and scales sufficiently.

YAGNI at least means "Don't add a new technology to your personal stack unless you can't be productive with whatever is already there."

For many (most?) of us, our comfort zone for data persistence is SQL. For some, it might be XML. Just don't write your own until (see paragraph 2).