data-design question

[Charles Hartman]

Thanks for your very thought-provoking response. One little piece:

On Sep 26, 2005, at 7:04 PM, Dick Kriesel wrote:

> performance data =
>     recording
>     artist
>     instrument -- examples: guitar, voice
>     performance category -- examples: solo, lead, backup

This isn't quite right, because each of the several performers on a  
track plays a different instrument (occasionally even two!). I  
mention it because it's an example of how the data involved is multi- 
layered: an album composed of tunes each of which has several players  
each of whom has at least one instrument and each of whom also  
presumably plays different roles (solo, comping, etc) at different  
times. So it's got to be "thick" metadata, not flat. But I don't know  
what I'm talking about, really, so I'll shut up.

People here have convinced me not to write a whole relational  
database manager from scratch (that didn't take much). As far as I  
can tell, if I want to do this open-source (except for Dreamcard),  
that makes my choices either
         MySQL with Dreamcard
or
         SQLite with Python
because those seem to be the available combinations. Am I wrong? I'd  
rather know what the choices are before I make one and start thinking  
about plunging in and learning a new system.

Charles