Usually my practice even with small databases has been to pulverize them with a highly normalized schema implemented in #postgres. But this week I discovered GNU #recutils, which seems (together with #emacs #recmode) just right for the early, exporatory phase of an analysis.
https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/
https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/rec-mode-manual/rec-mode.html

@dalias @rdonoghue #RecUtils <3, but also for forums I'd honestly consider just a non-federating instance of #INN (#NNTP) with a web client.

#PHPBB still works... but then the NNTP interface would need to be tacked back on.

What should I use for #HumanReadable #Configuration files?

#INI kinda sucks for a number of reasons, #JSON works but it's JSON, its derivatives are much the same but harder to parse...

Would that be a reasonably good match for #RecUtils?

#XML sucks as a user-facing anything.

I thought of s-exps but the reality of intern bombing & arbitrary execution in the Lisp reader make me rather reluctant to keep using that now.

And also that isn't perfectly portable unless I make my own reader.