After releasing the beta version of Pritlog 0.412, I started doing performance tests on Pritlog using varying number of posts. When I reached over 500 posts, I started noticing performance issues and slow response times. Crossing 1000, it almost was not responding.

This is when I started searching for a better solution for using flat files in PHP. I came across the following solutions of using flat file databases in PHP. These use SQL to retrieve rows from a flat file. Very interesting. But the performance did not improve any as these were still flat files. Anyway, these are interesting and can be very useful.

* http://www.txtsql.com/ – (has an admin like phpmyadmin)
* http://code.google.com/p/phpsimpledb/
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdb-php/
* http://lukeplant.me.uk/resources/flatfile/

Below link has some discussion about flat file db’s.
http://www.usenet-forums.com/php-language/393159-pure-php-flat-file-databases.html

In many places, I found that Sqlite is recommended for speed and performance. It is much more superior than flat files and also, it is installed by default on most php installations. Hence no separate server install or software required.