Python choice of database

[EP]

Oren suggested:

> How about using the filesystem as a database? For the number of records
> you describe it may work surprisingly well. A bonus is that the
> database is easy to manage manually.

I tried this for one application under the Windows OS and it worked fine...

until my records (text - maybe 50KB average) unexpectedly blossomed into the 10,000-1,000,000 ranges.  If I or someone else (who innocently doesn't know better) opens up one of the directories with ~150,000 files in it, the machine's personality gets a little ugly (it seems buggy but is just very busy; no crashing).  Under 10,000 files per directory seems to work just fine, though.

For less expansive (and more structured) data, cPickle is a favorite.