Git advantage:

  • decentralized, offline
  • branching
  • easy to diff, to backup, to parse (if suitable language chosen)

Advantage of text files specifically:

  • trivial to access
  • can have comments
  • hierarchical data

Hosted database:

  • easy to build GUI (ecosystem there – much less so for plain files)
  • difficult to access
  • scales to much larger size
    • indexing -> faster to search
  • transactions

Sqlite:

  • in Git: mostly combines disadvatages and makes a mess
  • scales pretty well
  • doesn’t play nice with Dropbox/NFS

Editing non-text files as text: Example from Pixar (USDEdit)