Newbie wondering what database to make as a simple reference

Hello friends!

I’m more of a frontend guy still, but I’m working on a personal project (English word games for online teachers) and want to create a reference for the different games to pull the words from. Ideally I could take my information from my spreadsheet of lessons and words, and create a way for a website to access that information, then filter it based on a drop down menu (e.g. level 3, unit 5, lesson 2, nouns). Could anyone help me find the right solution? Do I need something like SQL, MongoDB? Some of the tutorials I’ve run through focus on CRUD databases, and I don’t need anything that malleable as the users won’t be updating the database at all.

Thank you for any and all help!

Maybe look into firebase?

It can be reasonably lightweight and sounds like it’ll suit your needs. In my experience it can be a bit tricky to set up properly because some of the docs were out of date when I last used it - that was a while ago, so it might be fine now.

Mongo is a good choice too, but you need to do a bit more of the management of the server etc. Personally I find that easier to work with than firebase, but that’s just because I have more experience there.

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I think the choice depends partially also from what language you are using for the backend.
For example, if you are using PHP, I’d consider MySQL as a RDMS. PHP has some built in functionality to work with MySQL (mysqli and pdo if I remember correctly).
If you are using JavaScript/Node, I’d go with MongoDB or Firebase.
Also are you using a web hosting? I found that the majority of them have PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL and lack the support for Node (unless you spend a ton of money).

Thank you, I will look more into it. Right now I’m trying to just use google sheets api for a read only database.

There is no backend right now, it’s just a simple game page. I’m trying out google sheets api as a read only database first, but I like the idea of moving on to Mongo. Hopefully I can just convert my spreadsheet into a json object and do that again as I need to update it.