IMO, the DB hack is a cleaner solution, because it is faster, uses a documented feature and has clean syntax for using it. To achieve such clean syntax with a source filter, you need to write a complex regex.

Besides that, source filters don't work everywhere (like in eval) and I really think the included file should by itself be syntactically correct. Including code is bad, but including partitial expressions is, IMHO, even worse.

On the other hand, the source filter really literally includes, while the DB hack only loads and runs during runtime.