Constants vs Database

Question

Hi all, 
 
 I am developing an application that contains a questionnaire with around 20 questions. There are also around 10 sections to display help. 
 Both questions and help can be updated by the users. 
 I dont know if I should create 30 constants or store the data in the DB. 
 For performance reasons I think is better to use constants but for memory management and scalability I think the DB makes more sense. 
 Is there any recommendation about this?

Mike Schmitt · Answer

If questions will be editable in any respect, including changes to existing questions and/or addition or removal of questions, the clear winner is the DB based solution, since managing that via constants would be either difficult or impossible. Doing this in its own DB table also lets you easily store and use other metadata with each question, like if you want to get tricky with multiple question types, answer styles, etc.

Dave Lewis · Answer

To me, the next question is the most important to revealing the optimal solution. 
 Will your questions be updated regularly, or very rarely? 
 Regularly: Use a database call. Query the database every time, and save your updates to the database every time. 
 Very Rarely: For the sake of sparing your users and the bandwidth to the DB, it's much, much faster to query a constant. You can have the users update the constant, which will add negligible time to the update process, but spare the examine process, which will net you far greater savings than losses, but only if the updates are very rare. Keep in mind also that all versions of a Constant get saved somewhere. So you will continue to add to your memory footprint very slowly as you update.

Constants vs Database

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