in reply to Re^2: Which databases to use?
in thread Which databases to use?

Are some of the question multiple choice questions? If so you have relational data : there is a one to many relationaship between a question and the multiple possible answers to that question. Do you need to track information about authors? If so you have relational data since there is a one to many relationship between one author and the multiple questions they have written.

But whether the data fits the relational model is not, IMNSHO, the only thing to consider. You also need to consider who is going to write the code that does things like adding new data, removing old data, querying data, displaying data result sets in various formats, etc.

These operations are standard operations for RDBM systems regardless of the complexity of the data. Therefore there already exist many solutions and you don't need to re-invent inserts, update, delete, display, etc. yourself. Do those solutions exist for other non-RDBMS systems? Well they can certainly be recreated with Perl, anything can. But I doubt you'll find the breadth of solutions already created in the RDBMS world. In Perl RDBM systems are primarily accessed through DBI which presents a standard interface. This means that there are many people who are familiar with how to do all of those operations and that there are many modules that allow you to do those operations in a coding style you prefer.