Database Basics

Hey everyone,

My name is Robbie, i'm 26 and i live in Salt Lake City, Utah and i have been teaching myself how to program in C# for about 5 years or so now.  I have only written one decent functioning program so far and i am working on making it better and starting a new one.  I started programming because my Dad had written a DOS program in QuickBasic 1.0 back in the 1990 and i was always helping him use it and fix it.  When i was in college in my free time i decided to help him bring his software to the 21st century and update it into dotnet.  I started using VS 2003 with C++ and VB but liked C# the best and have rewritten his basic functionality over the last couple of years.  However, i would like to learn to program better and do more with it now.

Enough about me, I just wanted to say hey and introduce myself.  Someone looked at my code and told me that it was obvious that i was learning as i was going, but that didn't help me too much because i don't know what was good, bad, or the right way to do things.  Nevertheless, he also told me that i should be implementing a database for this program and i think i agree, because the old files were tab delimited txt files, i updated to my basic understanding of xml for slightly better use, but i feel from my limited knowledge a database would work the best.

The problem is i understand excel and consider it a rudimentary database, but i know nothing else about implementing, maintaining or using a database.  I understand basic structure but that’s about it. I am interested in the basics and what would be best for me.  I am considering MS Access because there is a robust excel file that analyzes the data the program saves into xml files, but i wrote the program in C# express 2005, so i don't know if Access is even an option to use.  So I would like to know what people think would be for me if i analyze the data in excel currently with xml and wrote the program in C#.