another cgi / database concern (SQL vs. 'shelve')

[Stephen Aichele]

thanks to those who replied to may last questions here.  what a busy
mailing list!

So the next topic:  For the site I'm building, I'll need to access
user stats and log user input rather frequently.  The amount of data
to be stored for any given user is not significant, but there will be
a lot of accessing of database files.  

I have no experience with SQL, but I do have experience using shelve
for persistent storage of data.  I'd like to get some exposure to
SQL, but I'm not sure if it is overkill for what I'm doing -
considerations would be the learning curve of SQL and whether or not
continual access of and writing to a db file using 'shelve' would be
wise.  

any suggestions greatly appreciated.

- Stephen