Database or file server

I am currently developing a plugin for my upcoming server, but I don't know if I should use a database for storing warps, players, reports, etc. or files.

Advantages and disadvantages would be nice.

 

Fair enough - If what you said is true then I'll probably got with the database as the 'players' table alone will have many columns (+ 1 row per player) so it should become large.

Thanks.

 

Databases aren't slower for small amounts of data. There are tons of factors that can contribute to slow databases and slow filesystems, but in general they're both equally capable of performing well if your code is well designed.

The deciding factor shouldn't be performance, that can be addressed by using your chosen storage backend efficiently. Usually that means doing as much work as possible off of the main thread. Loading frequently used data into memory onEnable and flushing it to disk in small amounts periodically. etc.

You probably want to support both in the long run, because in the end, it's up to the server admin, some prefer to have their data in a database where they can analyze it and integrate it into their website or other scripts/plugins etc. others prefer the convenience of having EVERYTHING self-contained within the plugin data folder.