We need to be able to be able to scale to 10K users. Can someone give me some feedback or perhaps point me to a resource in order to accomplish authenticating users to Mysql or Oracle.
Why don't you run some tests and see for yourself how well it scales? First hand knowledge is a good thing.
Regardless, putting in an SQL database to solve this is an absurd amount of overkill. If a linear search of the file isn't fast enough (and I can't image it wouldn't be), sort the cram-md5 file on the authentication identifier field and use a binary search to do the lookups.
--lyndon
