Want To Ditch Filemaker

I have been developing Filemaker pro for the last four years or so for a small machine shop erp/mrp system. Through Filemaker I have learned a bit about relational data base design and data modeling but I would really like to move onto something else that is open source and extremely flexible. I'm really open to lea开发者_如何学Crning anything have been self teaching myself C, Python, MySQL and a bunch of applescript. My question is really what do I need to know to make complex dynamic database using C, C++, Java, Python, html, xml, lisp, Unix, or whatever else that is fast, reliable and extremely flexible on the front and back ends?

This is probably a question better suited for programmers.stackexchange.com, but I'll go there anyway.

Don't try to roll your own database system at this point. You can learn relational databases on MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite, for starters. All those are freely available. You can at a minimum learn SQL to use with any of those tools. Most programming languages in wide use have some library that can interface with these database systems.

Learn more about data modeling, particularly about normalization and indexing, while you're at it.