Personal Projects Please

Matthew McLennan - Array's forget, they don't write anything to disk.

When your PHP process ends all the data in an array goes up in smoke. Databases store data in special kinds of files so you can access it later.

Hey Matthew,

We'll be covering how to store the products in a database in a future tutorial. I'd personally say stick with an array as long as you can. Adding a database adds complexity and overhead that can slow down the site, limit your hosting options, make it hard to back up data, make deploying data to production trickier, etc. I have a number of smaller sites that run on PHP only and store structured data in an array like the Shirts 4 Mike site.

You'd want to switch to a database when you reach any of these points:

• If non-technical users need to change the data
• If the number of products grows to a point where the making changes to the array are too hard to make (what counts as "too hard" is completely relative to your threshold for pain :-) )
• If you need to store data that relates products to each other or to other types of data (companies, categories, etc.)
• If you need different data in multiple environments (like development, test, stage, and production environments)

Of course, for many sites and applications you'll have one of these conditions in place right at the start. You'll need to start with a database a lot of the time. But I think people are too quick to jump to a database for a simple site like the Shirts 4 Mike site, when an array would probably serve them better.