What is generally faster, grepping through files or running a SQL LIKE %x% query through blobs?

Question

Say I'm designing a tool that would save code snippets either in a PostgreSQL/MySQL database or on the file system. I want to search through these snippets. Using a search engine like Sphinx doesn't seem practical because we need exact text matches of code when searching code.

grep and ack and has always worked great, but storing stuff in a database makes a large collection of stuff more manageable in certain ways. I'm wonder what the relative performance of running grep recursively over a tree of directories is compared to running a query like SQL's LIKE or MySQL's REGEXP function over an equivalent number of records with TEXT blobs is.