Algorithm for Labels like in Gmail

[Rodolfo]

Hi George,

George Sakkis wrote:

> Google for "many-to-many relationships". In short, you have two entity
> classes (say emails and labels) where each instance of one entity may
> be associated to zero or more instances of the other entity. In
> databases you implement this by having three tables, one for each
> entity and one for their association:
>
>    Email     RelEmailLabel     Label
> ----------   --------------    ---------
> ID        <--- EmailID          ID
> subject        LabelID --->     name
> ...                             ...
>

Ok, but how can I keep my Relationship Table out of bugs, bad data?!
I wonder how i'll control the following:
1st) Given an generic email, in which group(s) is it contained?
2nd) Given a group, which Emails/contacts does it contain?

I don't have much expererience with databases (yet).
Will the pysqlite work with ease? Because I don't mean to make a big
big program, just something very simple for my personal use.

>
> Then you can associate mails to labels by joining all three tables
> together on the IDs. Of course you can implement this in memory as well
> but you should probably want to store them in some persistent area
> anyway, so an rdbms the way to go. Sqlite (with pysqlite) would meet
> your needs just fine.

I'll google for this module tomorrow and try to learn something about
it.
I plan to post the code I manage to write.

BTW which is the best way to store all those data files? Plain text
files? Some kind of binary file? or what?

Thank you once again,

Rodolfo