I say, "Create the Text Database", because its
1.) An awesome project to work on and finish
2.) It does have many real world uses (in video games)
3.) Its definitly an accomplishment
4.) And it would work well while you are in a testing phase for a much large scale release.

But in any case, you can't really beat an SQL server for reliablity or scaleability (or any of its siblings - Oracle etc...)

Imagine in a text file, delimiting it by a comma or a tab or pipes or a string, "!$%!&$&*%($!" Now, imagine that you have 3,000 records.

Now, picture this, someone registers or enters some kind of text that is the delimiter, now the entire database is essentially corrupted, unless you can find where the delimiter has been entered. Kinda scary.

Of course, preventative measures could be done to protect against this. So when you are coding this system, make sure you check that the input does not contain a delimiter.

I just wanted to throw that out their, Even though I might sound like an ass, I'm really looking forward to this when its finished.

Doesn't sound foolish to me. What you have described is a classic "invalid input" vulnerability. If you wanted to kill a database, the same is true. Find out what the format for field delimiter is, and use it in your input (in SQL you can add special characters to a query that can over-write the entire database! That is called an "injection") and write multiple records at one write.

Good advice to restrict your inputs, AND to check the length of your inputs, AND to validate that it is only reading/writing a single field.

my 2¢
Mark

How is this going? I'm curious for updates.