Echoing results from a database

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
If I may ..

Fuzzy's point is that storage of data that doesn't change much, and doesn't need to be indexed (not hard to find what you want in the set of data), and is quite small - make the data good candidates for not being stored in a database.

Consider a bunch of your data - you have a number of ways of storing it. If it was an array full of different types of data - strings, characters, numbers, other arrays, etc - then you could pull it apart and store each bit in the right place (lots of different tables) in a database.

Or you 'serialize' it - which means to convert a 'lump of data' into an easily storable form that you can later, as you'd expect, unserialize back into the original lump of data. This is much faster / easier than breaking it apart and dumping into a database, and then carefully reassembling it from that database later.

But .. in this case.. your motivation (get DB connectivity going, etc) makes sense, as does the goal of portability.