best small database?

[David Isaac]

Thanks to all for the suggestions and much else
to think about.

Summarizing:

Those who were willing to consider a database suggested:
anydbm
Gadfly
SQLite (included with Python 2.5)
Schevo

Some preferred using the file system.
The core suggestion was to choose a directory structure
along with special naming conventions to indicate relationships.
Not all who suggested this said how to store info about the files.
One suggestion was:
   Store the info in a text file and read the
   entire file into memory and do linear searches.  Python can search
  100's of items in a list faster than you can even begin an SQL query.

Alan Isaac