Perhaps database programming should not be considered part of the DT group's core responsibilties. Perhaps, from the viewpoint of everyone except the DT editors, DT shouldn't have any software at all.

If all of the DT pages are put on a server as static ASCII text (i.e., simply as small files), and if the pages are organized with minimal HTML*, then it should be possible for all of the search capability to be outsourced to sites such as Google. There might be a DT site search form that automatically transmits the string which tells Google to search only DT instead of the whole web, but creating that form is much, much easier than actually hosting a search service. Google (or other search engines) can the do all of the heavy lifting, keep up with changes to the underlying platform software, etc.

(*Another alternative would be some combination of XML to mark fields and CSS to control their display. This could facilitate some kinds of search.)

The same process of making the pages clean will also aid those individuals who want to download the entire DT, run searches on their own computers, and view the results in their web browsers. These days, there are plenty of applications that let a user search a collection of documents on disk. Any user who wants such an application can download one appropriate to the user's platform.

DT's core competence is the compilation, editing, and presentation of song lyrics, tunes, and supplementary information. For this purpose, good software for the editors' use is essential. Behind the scenes, these editors need some kind of database to structure and validate the entries, keep the whole project organized, and retain their persoal sanity. Also, the database needs to be able to generate static web pages (including table-of-contents type pages and perhaps a few index pages) ready for upload to a hosting server, but such uploading can be done on a batch basis every few weeks. At current upload speeds between the database and the hosting server, even a 100 MB upload every few weeks would not be prohibitive; in fact, most pages would not change between uploads, so the actual updates could be much smaller. Also, a web site consisting entirely of static pages, with only a little scripting to facilitate submitting searches to outside sites, ought to be much more easily portable between hosts than is a web site with an active back-end database.

To summarize, yes, a DT programmer is needed, put perhaps not for the tasks originally envisioned.