Last updated on September 21, 2022
DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn’t require a database.
It is loved by users for its clean and readable syntax.
The ease of maintenance, backup and integration makes it an administrator’s favorite.
Built in access controls and authentication connectors make DokuWiki especially useful in the enterprise context and the large number of plugins contributed by its vibrant community allow for a broad range of use cases beyond a traditional wiki.
Before reading on, remember the characteristics of wiki data:
- read often, updated less often
- mixed and unstructured text content
A file system is an extremely efficient place for storing data. That’s where a DBMS is likely to put its data. For simple retrieval a file system should beat the pants off a DBMS. Its quite likely a well constructed DBMS application will cache the results of its common queries in the file system for faster retrieval!
Additionally all modern file systems cache frequently accessed files in memory. Reading this data will not even hit the disks anymore.
Much of a DokuWiki’s work is simple retrieval – get a file and show its contents possibly with some processing. This is very well suited to a file system. Databases excel when dealing with highly structured data and also where small pieces of that data are updated frequently. Wikis aren’t like that.
[…]