Plain text vs Database Storage

Question

I need to store a large string that represents music notation in text format. This string could be anywhere between a few lines to several hundred.

I need to store meta data about the string (eg artist, instrument etc) in a database.

I'm wondering, would it be better to store the large text string in a flat file or in the database?

I think if I store it in the database it might be easier to monitor concurrency issues etc... but then in a flat file it would be easier to scale.

Answer 1

If you're already storing the metadata about the music in a database, then just store the string representation alongside it.

That way all your information is in a single place and you won't have to worry about retrieving data from two locations when a user wants to fetch it.