What's the best practice for storing huge amounts of text (into a DB or as a file?), and what about compressing it?

For images and documents that are already in a specific format (excel, word documents, pdf files, etc) I prefer file storage. But for just raw text I would probably rather use a database. It is easier to replicate across machines for failover, you can do substring searches over the text and although I don't know of a specific algorithm to use to compress it, I would think that a database would be a better way to go.

But only if you already have just the text and it is only text. Any other format of document I would prefer using file storage.

One of the main reasons for keeping the files in a database is to keep it consistent with the rest of the data that you are storing. It will be easier to make backups, (re)deploy with predefined datasets etc. Furthermore it's easier to guarantee transactional integrity.

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