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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

As a thought, since you're just getting into database stuff as time permits, it's probably better to start out with something like SQLite and/or DB Browser for SQLite, if you prefer the GUI way of doing things.

https://sqlitebrowser.org

https://a-gentle-introduction-to-sql.readthedocs.io/en/lates...

SQLite is a bunch easier to get up and running than MySQL, and the data is all in one file you can copy around. So, easy to backup. :D

If you do eventually hit it's limits, it's big brother is PostgreSQL, which is a really powerful database system. :)

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I second that. SQlite is great. I had millions of lines in there and did not hit limits that were blocking me from doing analysis work in python based on the data in SQlite.

So parent should probably be fine with a solution like this.

Portable, local and without the server configuration hassel.

If you use LibreOffice then you can make a spreadsheet into a "database source" and query it with SQL. That seems like a good interim, you can move sheets and make them external tables as you grow in confidence/knowledge.

At least you could 10 years ago, very easily (it was OOo.org I was using then I think) - I made a simple customer record system just 4 or 5 tables but the address "table" was a kind-of view of the spreadsheet for email-merge.

Presumably Excel and others do this too.

I do use LibreOffice. There seems to be some way of using SQL to access Base data, but I still didn't explore that.

Thanks. I'll give it a try. I chose MySQL because I knew there were Python libraries I could use.

Cool. Python has libraries for practically everything. :)

The SQLite libraries seem to be built into Python, so nothing extra to add:

https://docs.python.org/2/library/sqlite3.html

https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html

And the PostgreSQL equivalent:

http://initd.org/psycopg/

Hmmm, there seem to be several PostgreSQL Python libraries around, all in active development.

You'll probably be fine with SQLite though. :)

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