Choosing the right database-system for a small project

[Thomas Weholt ( PRIVAT )]

I've got a rather small project, small in the sense that there's not a lot
of different tables needed in the database/storage-system, but there will be
alot of data and the clients must be able to scan thru huge amounts of data
very fast ( Not serial scanning, but lookups by key, preferrably several
keys pr record, ie. I need to lookup people both by SSN and by
first/last-name etc. )

So far I've used MySQL, mainly because I need something that installs easily
on both Linux and Windows. But I don't need a big user-management system, I
need something light, a bit more flexible than shelve, and as I said earlier
I need to lookup data by several key-fields.

I've also looked at MetaKit and this seems like just my kind of thing. Easy
to use and install. Remember that I've only looked at the docs, not tried
anything for real. Another contender is SQLLite. It's very important that
the system is easy to install. Anything more than "copy these files in this
folder" or run this install-program on Windows is unacceptable, and anything
more than configure/make/make install without lots of other library
dependancies on Linux is also out of the question.

Can anybody share experiences with these solutions? Speed, flexibility,
installation issues? I intend to use this with Twisted so if there are any
blocking issues I need to consider please let me know. Any other system I
should take a look at ??

Thanks a bunch,
Thomas