which db should I use?

[Peter Hansen]

Jim Richardson wrote:
> 
> Peter Hansen wrote:
> > It's unclear even after your description why you want to use a
> > relational database.  Is it simply because that's part of the
> > learning experience you've set for yourself, or are there particular
> > performance requirements or a need for relational operations?
> 
> probably because I am a clewless newbie and don't know any other options
> :) What is available that isn't relational?

Well, there's object (OO) databases, object-relational DBs, and there's 
things that aren't typically described as databases although they are: 
e.g. files in the file system such as I mentioned.  A database is more
than just storage; normally it's a database manager (or DBM) which 
provides all kinds of capabilities beyond just storage.

> > Why not just store them as files in the file system?
> 
> searches are really slow with grep, on an ext3 filesystem. I wouldn't
> mind a file based system, but will probably go with a db system in order
> to learn more about SQL

No need to use grep, unless you want to.  Normally you would want to
index the files, so that a search for key words becomes an extremely
fast operation.  Even in a database...

> > Well, okay, if it's just to learn SQL.  But you might find better
> > types of data for that purpose.
> 
> Well, probably better data out there, but this gets two birds with one
> stone.

In that case, go for it.  (Personally, I would try to decouple the
birds from each other and focus on one at a time, but then I've got
dozens of birds flying around that I haven't even tried to catch yet...)

-Peter