I am currently writing a program and among other things need to store data.
The program listens to two computers talking to each other in a known protocol (the program know what protocol it is,the user give the program the protocol structure ), if the packet that arrived to the program has unseen value in one or more of the fields it add it to the database.
I am not sure what data storage method(such as sql server,xml etc.) to choose since I don't know whether the data stored in the database would be large or not, it depends on the computer's conversation
Also I will need to be able to get all the data from the database with no trouble and might need to extract some data and not the other (for example all the packets with the value 24 in field x)
By protocol I can't just give you one because the user of the program defines which protocol the conversation is in.
By conversation I mean that two computers talk to each other it doesn't matter if a user operate the computers or not.
The maximum number of entries in the database would be the number of variations that the packet in the certain protocol can be. I mean if the protocol is 8 bytes long the maximum number of entries would be 2^64 but if the header is longer the number goes up, but the number of entries could be less depending on the conversation and it is out of my control.
The program will only store unique headers, I mean that the same combinations of values in the header won't be in the DB twice, the program store the header if it is unique and it isn't stored in the DB
I thought of using a sql server such as mysql but I am not sure what data storage method would suit this situation the most?