{newbie}Powerhouse with flat file back end

[BUTLER,MATT (A-Roseville,ex1)]

My company is investigating use of a powerhouse application that uses a flat
file back end on HP-UX UNIX.

<questions type=newbie>
I seem to be the only one that thinks this is a problem.  In this day and
age this seems pretty archaic to me.  Has anyone had experience with such a
system?  Are there scalability and file locking issues?  What about
contention and/or possible corruption of files?

Not knowing much about it does PH talk directly to the files?  Or does it
use something else as an intermediary to handle the I/O?
</questions>

Thanks

Matt Butler