title: Large strings: Text files or SQL DB?
body: <p>I am coding a forum system using PHP.</p>
  
  <p>I am currently storing a threads ID, title, author, views and other attributes in an SQL database and then storing the thread body (the HTML and BBcode) in text files inside a folder named after the thread ID. </p>
  
  <p>In practise it's really simple to grab the database values then just grab the thread body from the text file, but I was wondering if this is the 'proper way'? I have personally no problems doing this but if it turns out it is massively inefficient and I should instead store both the thread body HTML and BBcode in the database instead then I will change.</p>
  
  <p>However, to me it seems wrong to store such a (very possibly) huge string of multi-line text along with lots of different characters in a database - I was taught that databases are more for short field 'values' rather than website content.</p>
  
  <p>I would just like a definitive answer to this because it's been bugging me for ages as to wherever I’ve been doing it properly.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know how popular forum systems store threads?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Added</strong>
  Thanks for the answers, so it's best to store thread content in the database, what field type should i use?
  Also what about replies? Another table which has the thread ID  and comment ID then the comment body?
  I'm new to this database stuff so thanks for your help.</p>