What kind of database would be best suited to maintaining a relatively large list of items with a counter for each item that is updated often in real time?

If this is a thing that you'll only run on one machine I'd just use an internal datastructure, a red-black tree or perhaps a trie for something as simple and small as this.. Or I'd embed a key/value pair database such as BerkeleyDB.

It never even occurred to me to keep it in memory... it never does. I don't know why. – Daniel Nov 9 '09 at 5:17.

If you have 1 or 2 tables maybe 1 or 2 indexes, no need for enterprise features (clustering/replication/Flashbacks) then any DB can do good from mysql (the free one) to sql express(still free) , sql server and oracle which both are commercial and cost money. You need to understand that the hardware might have a role here too, as the schema looks very simple and there wouldn't be much optimization possible - but then again - I don't know your exact needs... (on the other hand if you're talking about extreme large tables with a lot of read and writes - and I mean A LOT you might need a configuration of 2 active nodes and other advanced features than might push you towards paid databases).

Oh definitely free. I'm not so much talking about scaling as concept. I'll edit that into the question.

– Daniel Nov 8 '09 at 7:05 So start with mysql if you like linux, or sql express if you like windows, it's a simple database, and both can hold it. In your case you might as well implement a memory based DB (very fast - but confined to your RAM limits. – Dani Nov 8 '09 at 7:29.

Have a look at the papers and ideas behind Google BigTable (and the MapReduce operations possible on it). There's other implementations that think in that box; you're really implementing a distributed hash table, to give you some juice to throw at Google.

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