Best way to store and retrieve player information?

Hi I want to create a plugin and I need to store information about every player. What's the best way to do that?

What is the best way to store and retrieve information about a player ?

Say my plugin keeps track the money a player has. How would I store that information in a file?

Would I have a file for every player and when the player executes a command to add or remove money from their account I would open the file, read and and write the new value?
Or
Have a single file for every player and read of that?

 

About 1 kilobyte for every player

 

A database is an option but isn't it slower than using a file?

 

You could try to use the YamlConfiguration. It's very easy to use and there are many tutorials for it. But like timtower said, it might not be a good idea to store 1kb for each player in there (that's around 1000 characters), which sounds more like a SQL or MongoDB job to me.

Oh and maybe you already knew this, but to store something for a player you can simply map their unique id's to anything you want like your player balances. So something along the lines of

Code:

//playerfileconfig is of type 'YamlConfiguration'
playerfileconfig.set(player.getUniqueId(), playerBalance);

//playerfile is of type 'File'
try{ playerfileconfig.save(playerfile); } catch(Exception e){}

could work. I hope this helps you getting started!