PHP comes with SQLite which pretty much is a zero-setup SQL database. That means, setting up a database and opening it for using is just one line of code. Creating the table structure above is similarly trivial: mere few lines.

You don’t need an admin section since you can open the SQL console and enter the table creation stuff there. This is comparable to typing in and uploading the text file so I wouldn’t think that has any overhead. In fact, you can create the database at home and the upload the file on the web server (it really is that simple – one file per database). Editing the data can be done with some third party tool similar to PHPmyadmin.

Writing queries can’t be avoided. However, I can’t see where’s the overhead in that. The only thing different from writing some table accessing code in PHP is that it’s a different language (which I think is pretty essential to master, for your own good). In the end you probably end up typing in far less SQL than PHP, thanks to the database doing things for you (e.g. checking for dupe names and numbers, not to mention if you need to do any relational stuff at all).

I think my overall point is that while you can avoid extra work by doing things in a simple way, it easily grows into something that has nothing but overhead. If you see just a tiny bit of extra work in the beginning, it might save you the most work of all compared to the full and minimal mindsets.

These days I tend to grab random actor’s names off of IMDB.