Persistence of Data
Should you use a Compound Document or a Database?,
page 11
I've been asked this question any number of times. In fact, a large part of the purpose of this article is to dispel this question. Note that I say dispel - not answer. The question can't be answered because it is intimately tied to the design of each individual application.
If your application is storing multiple groups of records, where all of the records in a group are similar to each other, and requires sophisticated search and filtering capabilities and support for the definition of relationships between records in different groups (tables), then you probably need a database.
If you wish to create a private document format that contains arbitrary types of data of different sizes, and perhaps objects from other applications, Structured Storage might be a better choice.
In either case, the problem is first to determine the needs of your particular application. Once the requirements are defined, the choice of technology will, in most cases, be clear.
