This may be the wrong category to post in, but its where I'm posting it :-p I'm starting up a website which will rely heavily on the database - it's kind of like a social-networking type site. Before I begin creating the database, I'm not sure where to create it in. MySQL? SQL Server? Access (is that even an option?)? Something else? I'm currently looking for a free or low-cost option (i.e. not $20k Oracle ).
This may be a stupid question, but if I choose SQL Server or Access, how do I go about getting the database online for me to query to from the site?
If I choose MySQL, is there is a visual way to create the database that I'm not aware of (and im not aware of much, apparently, with MySQL). By visual way I mean not typing out CREATE tables in notepad and importing them :-p

Thanks for any help you can provide me!

your choice of ISP may also limit your choice of DB and or web server language and in consequence development environment

free usually means MySQL. you can get free versions of the other db's (such as SQL server, Oracle, DB2 ans so on) but these are limited tothe number of users.

consideriong MySQL to be free can be a misnomer, it is free under the GPL licence but as the db gets used in commercial applications there can be licening issues. howver being realisitic if the website becomes 'that' successful you will no diubt want to sign a maintenance contract with the db vendor.

as to how your the the dm on line, that depends on the ISP and how they let their customers connect with their servers. some allocate fixed IP addresses and allow connection through that some insist on other intermediate programs such as PHPMyAdmin.

as to visual ways of building the db there are tools such as MySQL's Workbench, if you can still get it theres Fabforce's dbDesigner, theres other tools such as Heidi SQL.

if you don't want the data modelling tools then MySQL Administrator can andle most of the table creation tasks in a gui environment. having created your tables and relationships in your development environment its then pretty trivial to move the db to your live db by dumping the db to a text file and then reloading that text file on the live server.

incidentally unless your website has few users then a file based db such as Access is unlikely to be up to the task

Thank you very much for your thorough response! Looks like I'll go with MySQL, gonna go check out those tools you mentioned. And yes, you're correct, if my website does "make it big" then I'll have the money to buy the big programs and all that
As for the ISP, I'm currently using Just Host, I'll have to check into what they allow/don't allow, and maybe move depending on that...