Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
Maybe it is just a reflection on the state of filesystems vs databases.<p>There is no fundamental difference between a database and a flat file, it is all bytes on a disk/memory in the end. So it is mostly a question of balancing the roles of the hardware, OS, and application software.<p>For example, if the reason you are using a database is that it does a particularly good job at limiting disk IO, then it may not be necessary with fast SSDs. If your reason for splitting into small files is to save RAM, it may not be necessary if you have more RAM. If you want to do to a distributed architecture, maybe your filesystem is not up to the task and you may want a database server.