I am working on an ASP .NET web application that will take a lot (thousands and thousands) of PDF files and allow users to search for a file/group of files and display them on the web page. Then the user can click the one they want and open it.
There are so many files that I don't want to access the directory structure every time someone searches for a file. So my question is this - should I store the file names/paths in a database or should I maybe use some sort of XML file? I would update it once a day or so. I have never really worked with XML before and was wondering if this would be a good application for it. Thank you for any ideas.