When you are designing a project with complex storage requirements and some demands on reliability and performance, a few options come to mind.
Even though at OpenPanel we have strong feelings about NIH, we didn’t think writing our own database store was the way to go. Many smart people have already written many different database backends, which means that in both quantity and quality the database area is well-covered. So, writing our own was right out.
The second option that comes to mind is to use the most basic kind of database available: a key/value store like Berkeley DB or GDBM. Combining a few key/value stores together yields a lot of flexibility, but there’s a lot of glue you need to write, then. In programming language terms, the key/value API is not powerful.
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