Hi!
I have a website on which registered users will submit their writings, 
articles, stories etc .. means lots of text will have to be saved and 
reterieved.
I talked to someone about this; he recommened using text files for storing 
articles (pages of text) instead of storing them in database(DB) to keep 
minimum DB size.
Instead of text files I tried to do that with XML cause its hard to 
control/search/reterieve text from text files, but i encountered 2 major 
problems.. (1) I had to convert symbols like <, >, etc (2) how to perform 
quick search for a specific word in the TEXT.
See http://www.desiwriters.com/preview/12.xml for the format. There will 
be separate xml file for each user.
Now the problem 1 can be solved easily... but what about when a user wants 
to search for a specific word or phrase in all articles/writings ?
There will be hundreds or may be thousands of xml files and each xml file 
will contain many articles/writings.

Can you please guide me what is the most efficient, reliable procedure to 
adopt ?
If text is stored in database then will the text formating will be saved 
too ?

you can also reply to me by email on shami_shah@h...