[dood]

Thanks for your thought-provoking comments, actually I had quite forgotten that I didn't necessarily need SQL (despite reading all the threads about that here)!

Trouble is, I understand the theory of in-memory data logged to disk, but as I'm just a humble hacker (self-taught amateur) there seem a lot of unknowns in such an approach. SQL, though a pain, is at least familiar and abundantly documented.

Guess I'll do a little more research, and a little more hacking, since I would be quite happy to drop SQL entirely!

[kashif]

Actually, I am self taught too and most hackers here are probably much better than me. I use python, if you do the same then try out Zope DB and schevo.org. These are Object based DBMS - non SQL. The problem like someone pointed out is that such systems are not language agnostic.