I did. I created a simple html form to input/edit/enter queries, and I had an html index holding common database queries. It worked extremely well as far as that goes, and it only took 90 minutes or so to get it working, so really a trivial setup cost.
There were two things I didn't like about it. I realized that browsability is really important - an SQL database works well if you know what to query, but it's just easier to have an old Yahoo-style index. I went with a wiki approach instead. The other thing is that it's easy to use version control with a pile of text files, but not so much with a database.
These days I do have some things in a "database" but that is a big text file that I query using Linux tools like grep and sed. Does everything I need and plays well with version control.
There were two things I didn't like about it. I realized that browsability is really important - an SQL database works well if you know what to query, but it's just easier to have an old Yahoo-style index. I went with a wiki approach instead. The other thing is that it's easy to use version control with a pile of text files, but not so much with a database.
These days I do have some things in a "database" but that is a big text file that I query using Linux tools like grep and sed. Does everything I need and plays well with version control.