From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2009-04-07T12:16:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Advice: XML vs. mySQL

On Apr 6, 2009, at 20:07, David Autry wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am new to Ruby and looking for some advice on how to best approach a
> problem.
>
> I am writing a Facebook application that will rely heavily on the
> manipulation of strings.  I want to set up a class, allow users to
> create objects based on the class, and write it to XML file or a
> database.  Each entry will be indexed (integer) for lookup and
> identification purposes.  When I need to load a specific object I will
> build it based on the XML data and the defined class.

If these are Ruby objects, why don't you use Marshal?

> I want to keep this as simple as possible unless resource
> management dictates I take the road less traveled.  The speed at which
> the data is accessed is most important.  I plan to load into memory  
> the
> files that are currently in use by a user to speed up the process so
> this makes me think that XML would suffice.  Hope this makes sense!

Marshal is likely going to be significantly faster than any XML  
serialization mechanism you write.