Kryptronic Software Support Forum

I was wondering if you'd consider using XML for storing config data instead of CSV, since in most cases XML is proceeding CSV as a standardized flat file method of storing structured data. It might make it somewhat more defined as what data needs to be in a database, which can be located seperate from the web server, and what data like config info that is static and can remain on the web server and cached.

It seems rather odd that right now I'm utilizing MySQL for most of the data for CCP but some of it is still stored in CSV files. Some of these CSV files are need to be database independed in order to define stuff like what database is being used, and the sturcture of the contents of the database. XML seems like it would be the best choice for static data stored on the web server especialy providing all the growing support for it. You can use standard caching modules to cache the contents of an XML file as a string, and then your web server wouldn't have any disk activity when loading the static config files, or even rarely changed data that can be database independent.

I'm not sure what the performance difference is for parsing CSV vs parsing XML, but it seems like there are about a billion different ways to parse an XML docuemnt with different ones being faster then others. I've had a small amount of experience working with XPath myself.