I am trying to figure out which bears a heavier load on a system:
Thanks in advance!
Usually file operations are slower than DB operations.
If you want to store a data collection in an XML file (ie. an XML database) I would unrecommend it, strongly. DBMSs implement lots of performance optimizations via indexes and caches: most of DB data is held in memory.
If you want to write large payloads to DB columns, it's not more efficient than having a column that points to a file and store the raw data inside the file.
Could be either, it depends on so many things. Is the database in-memory or not? When you say "file operation" do you mean just reading the raw bytes from the file or do you include parsing through those raw bytes for the data? There's just not enough data to go on.