alt Hacker NewsI don’t see how this addresses my point that zipped XML gives you the same thing, but simpler. I understand that a GIMP file is many images, so that makes a zip feel like a great fit to me. The only advantage I see for using a full-blown DB is ensuring consistency with references, which admittedly is a plus. But beyond that, what do you gain?
You're not:
- Continuously parsing and writing and reparsing text, 90% of which is useless (that's the JSON/S-expressions vs XML argument)
- Forcing a diverse relational structure to fit a tree hierarchy, hand-writing all the logic that manages representation change - either explicitly, at serialization boundary, or implicitly, in every single access operation you're doing to refer to some data;
- Or worse, using an off-the-shelf, generic object/XML mapper, in which case you just compound the bloat even more.
SQLite is one of the single most battle-tested and ubiquitous piece of software in the history of mankind. Anything "simpler" you're going to pick up is much more likely to be buggy and broken, and will definitely be orders of magnitude slower.