Is MySQL right for me?
I am a Mechanical Engineer w/ a tiny bit of programming experience. I've got a technical/software set of questions for you. I'm working on an idea to catalog all of my company's various hardware configurations in a searchable way. We custom design systems to fit into different customer machines. The machines are made by a handful of manufacturers, and each manufacturer makes a handful of models. We offer a handful of options on our systems, which obviously must be appropriate for the make and model of the customer's machine. We've got images, text, pdfs, and 3d solid models associated w/ each of our systems, and many of the machines.
My hope is that I can implement some sort of software solution that can tell our designers that system A with options 1 and 2 has been previously made in machines X, Y, and Z, and specifically for machine models alpha, beta, and gamma. Furthermore, I'd like to have links to folders/files associated with each individual system, so that we could search based on machine make and model, and system options, and be presented with a series of links to relevant data from previous designs.
This _sounds_ to me like a database (or maybe just a wiki?) with some sort of web based interface, which I'm pretty sure people here know a thing or twenty about. My preference is to use software that's free and already stable, as we're only doing a small scale, prototype project right now, and I'm going to be the one to do everything. Obviously, it needs to be something pretty straightforward, as I have practically zero experience establishing or administrating a database. I've done some looking at www.sourceforge.net, and have found 1 or 2 projects that may fit the bill. I wonder if MySQL is the right software package to consider, or if I'm totally off base, and if so, can someone suggest a better fit?
Thanks,
Adam Hartman