AbiWord: How much memory?

I am making decisions on the structure of a fairly large secure database for a "family registry". I can either:

make the whole database one BIG file. This makes searching for a name much easier using the FIND command as it will automatically search the whole database at one time. This would be my preferred method.
Or
(B) Break up the database into a number of smaller files.

I don’t know what temporary files AbiWord will be creating in the flash memory or how big those files will be relative to the original size of the file being worked on. If the answer is that AbiWord needs at least as much temporary space, or more, than the file being worked on - that could be a problem for the “one big file” methodology.

Can anyone help me here?

Thanks - Bill Garrigues