Hi,

I'm new to this forum and have a question which I think is mostly database related but not exclusively, so I hope it's ok to post it in this section.

Basically, I want to create a searchable database for movies and TV shows for the web (sort of like the IMDB but with an Asian twist). Many of the movies are Asian, so titles will be in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. However, many of them will also be in English. So what I need is a database where I can mix and match regular numbers and letters, Kanji/Kana, Big5, and Hangul, etc…, and in which I can then get resulting pages displayed properly on the web after searching for these using a search box in which any of these types of characters can be typed in.

I currently have all this information in MS-Access databases in properly normalized form with unique keys identifying each title and person. I'm quite familiar with SQL and somewhat familiar at writing HTML code, but I know virtually nothing when it comes to web-based databases. Which ones are the best for this sort of application? What should I be looking for in terms of web hosting? And what are some of the best and easiest to learn scripting languages?

I also want to be able to include pictures (movie posters, and screencaps) in the generated pages and like the IMDB want each name to be "clickable" and take you to other pages.

Any advice/help in pointing me in the right direction and starting me off on the right foot would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan

It looks like you need a reasonably sophisticated application that has multi-language support and good support for photos. I suggest you look at PostgreSQL - open-source freeware that is pretty sophisticated. They have an extensive website. The PostgreSQL folks have made an effort to have their SQL implementation be compliant with industry standards and interfaces are available for several different front-end languages (e.g. Java, PHP, Perl). Functions can also be written in several different languages, including c and their own language - pgsql. I didn't have any trouble learning pgsql.