I was curious why this was faster: At our company we store close to 50TB of certain transaction data and we stored it on a UNIX filesystem raw without any DBMS help. For example: country/A/name/A.txt country/B/name/B.txt country/C/name/C.txt and so on... We have close to 500 million entries in this format. When we do a read() on a file, its very fast and we enjoy it. Would we get a similar performance if we use a database and index it? TIA