I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you start writing the application without a database first.
My early education on databases always seemed to follow a "how do we make a database do this?" rationale rather than "what data do we need to store to support these features?", which I think leads to a software design that is too strongly coupled with the database. Software modules end up dependent on database features, or table structure, and refactoring or switching data stores becomes more costly.
Instead, start with a simple in-memory data store - a list of objects with some interface for accessing them, will probably your starting point. Add some basic serialisation/deserialisation features (CSV, JSON, etc) when you get past initial testing and require some persistent data. Then, once you have your API in place and your software design is stabilising, you should be able to map that data to a database fairly easily:
* The primary structure maps to your main table
* Child structures become additional tables, with foreign keys
* Data used to lookup records can be indexed for better performance
Beyond that, you should profile/benchmark your application to find what needs to be optimised, and then investigate whether your software design or your data store should be doing the optimisation.
Let your software's features influence the design of your database. Don't let the database's features influence the design of your software.
My early education on databases always seemed to follow a "how do we make a database do this?" rationale rather than "what data do we need to store to support these features?", which I think leads to a software design that is too strongly coupled with the database. Software modules end up dependent on database features, or table structure, and refactoring or switching data stores becomes more costly.
Instead, start with a simple in-memory data store - a list of objects with some interface for accessing them, will probably your starting point. Add some basic serialisation/deserialisation features (CSV, JSON, etc) when you get past initial testing and require some persistent data. Then, once you have your API in place and your software design is stabilising, you should be able to map that data to a database fairly easily:
* The primary structure maps to your main table
* Child structures become additional tables, with foreign keys
* Data used to lookup records can be indexed for better performance
Beyond that, you should profile/benchmark your application to find what needs to be optimised, and then investigate whether your software design or your data store should be doing the optimisation.
Let your software's features influence the design of your database. Don't let the database's features influence the design of your software.