David Isaac wrote: > I have no experience with database applications. > This database will likely hold only a few hundred items, > including both textfiles and binary files. > > I would like a pure Python solution to the extent reasonable. > > Suggestions?
You haven't provided enough requirements for us to make any intelligent suggestions. Perhaps you might learn something from reading through my old EuroPython presentation. http://www.thinkware.se/cgi-bin/thinki.cgi/DatabaseProgrammingWithPython Relational databases with SQL syntax provides a convenient way to store data with an appropriate structure. You can always force a tool into handling things it wasn't designed for, but SQL database work best when you have strict, well defined structures, such as in accounting systems, booking systems etc. It gives you a declarative query language, transaction handling, typically multi user support and varying degrees of scalability and high availability features. For you, it's probably overkill, and if you have files to start with, keeping them in the file system is the natural thing to do. That means that you can use a lot of standard tools to access, manipulate, backup and search through them. Perhaps you rather need a search engine for the file system? Do you intend to store information concerning how these files relate to each other? Perhaps it's better in that case to just keep that relationship information in some small database system, and to keep the actual files in the file system. Perhaps it's enough to keep an XML file with the structure, and to use something like ElementTree to manipulate that XML structure. You gain a lot of power, robustness and flexibility by using some kind of plain text format. Simple files play well with configuration management systems, backup systems, editors, standard search tools, etc. If you use XML, it's also easier to transform your structural information to some presentable layout through standard techniques such as XSL. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
