When is it worth it to setup a database rather than to just organize the data into files?

AwesomeQuest
Mon, 31 Mar 2025 09:32:30 +0000
Data

I’m building a library of example spectra for chemical analysis and I’m wondering what the benefits would be to setting up a database in mySQL or something with these spectra rather than just having files in folders with descriptive names.

There will probably be thousands of spectra with various properties that need to be searchable and each spectra is maybe 1MB at most.

Would there be significant performance benefits to adding these things to a database rather than reading directories? Is there a cost associated with reading files compared to mySQL (or other database framework)?

3 posts - 3 participants