What web database technologies would you recommend?

[rich]

It's been years since I had to build a web site and in the past I always used php+mysql. But I've a need to build a very small but data heavy site. I'm not worried about performance or security as it's not a public-facing site. But what I do need is a powerful database behind it, by that I mean one that allows me to throw in lots of data and ideally not have to specify relationships between all of it (in the traditional primary key MySQL sense).

 

I know lots of you are web devs, so what would you recommend? If there is a good clean front-end I can use to build out the admin area fast too that would be a bonus for sure. I have no desire to craft any of this in php by hand, there must be better ways these days

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

What server OS you are using? Using SSD or HDD? you need it to accept data frequently, do you need to read data from it as frequently? Based upon your needs it isn't difficult at all to make a small custom C based database engine...

EDIT:

You would be writing data from same server or from desktop/remote server?

[Quetzacotl]

Depends on your data access pattern (how often you read/write, how much at once, do you need advanced queries). if you don't want relationship then NoSQL is a way to go, in example redis. 

Redis stores data in a RAM and saves it to disk from time to time. But if you are gonna store a lot of data there then you will need a lot of RAM. Instagram is using redis for image paths.

In the case of admin backend, I'm using Django which has admin panel built-in, but it's Python. 

[rich]

Server, storage, RAM etc is sort of irrelevant really. This is for a non-public facing, minimal activity site. The scripts will be run to generate a block of JSON data for a game, so aren't needed to run in real-time or even be used very often. What I'm more interested in is finding a way to store lots of very disparate data and not having to worry about primary keys and indexing and relationships between it all. For example if I wanted to store a recipe in there then ideally I won't have to create a whole load of fields first, but could instead write an object to the database - does that make more sense?

[Autarc]

Are you comfortable with another language aside of PHP in the backend as well ?

 

Nowadays I would recommend you to use CouchDB or MongoDB for more complex systems. Both are neglecting SQL and purely based on JSON objects, which can be stored and retrieved easily. Wrapper & connectors exist for various environments - although I am using mainly NodeJS with additional modules. These take care of most aspects and allow a basic setup in a few steps. If you don't require a full query driven persistence layer, I second the idea of a simple key-value storage like redis.

[Paul Brzeski]

Are you comfortable with another language aside of PHP in the backend as well ?

 

Nowadays I would recommend you to use CouchDB or MongoDB for more complex systems. Both are neglecting SQL and purely based on JSON objects, which can be stored and retrieved easily. Wrapper & connectors exist for various environments - although I am using mainly NodeJS with additional modules. These take care of most aspects and allow a basic setup in a few steps. If you don't require a full query driven persistence layer, I second the idea of a simple key-value storage like redis.

 

+1

I use MongoDB and it's a joy. You can either communicate with MongoDB via it's API (if you're sticking wtih PHP) or if you happen to be running Node, you can use a wrapper like Mongoose

[WindSower]

yes MongoDB is a charm to work with, if You want a relational db I would sugest looking at postgresql