Benefits of Document Orriented DBs to an existing folder structure

Question

I would like to preface by saying I guess there is no real tangible problem, but I feel odd not having some system managing these things.

We currently have a large amount of XML files located in hierarchy of directories. I think it could be useful to use some Document Oriented DB around these folders. It could be extremely useful for searching purposes, but currently we have no need for search.

I am struggling to think of actual business reasons to even have a database currently. It could provide us an opportunity to "speed up our system" but I doubt scalability would ever be an issue.

Is there anything else that I have not considered?

Answer 1

One reason would be the ability to use fancy querying facilities on your documents. You could use XQuery more effectively if you had them in an XML database. But if you don't think speed will ever be an issue, and you have no need for searching or querying, I don't see a benefit in changing to a more sophisticated system.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it! :-)