That part is subjective - it doesn't tell us specifically how the data should be modeled or what operations need to be optimized. ForĮxample, modeling the availability of rooms in hotels in a way that The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality in a way that supports processes requiring this information. By that measure, your text file is a database. Wikipedia tells us that a database is an organized collection of data. When should a database be preferred for storing the data over storing the data in a text file? I had some doubts about the tags which could be added. PS: If better tags can be added please do so. When should a database be preferred for storing the data over storing the data in a text file? Are there some pointers that I can look for when making decisions about whether I need a database or simple text files? Just a note, I have never used any database and have no knowledge of SQL, MySQL or any other variants of RDBMS. It seems that using a database should be a better here because that way retrieving data should be easier. Initially this seemed good to me because I would be storing it myself and the format would be the same so it would be easily parsed but not I am not sure. I just ran the script twice to get the format I would be using in the file. The format I am using is the following 22-08-2013 The python script can be viewed on github. So far I have made enough to get the stats and append them to a text file.

My approach was to get the 'Site stats' shown on the front page and store them on my hard drive. I was making a Python program to measure the growth of codereview.SE.

.db text file