It might be good to go beyond your comfort zone and dive into relational theory and practices. Data tend to live way longer than applications. You want to hav

It might be good to go beyond your comfort zone and dive into relational theory and practices. Data tend to live way longer than applications. You want to have a language and application agnostic way to store and access data so that different applications in different languages can share the same data. You also can evolve your application platform and languages using the same data over time. Want to re-write your app in C# instead of Ruby? No problem. The data and access method stay the same. Of course if you are just building throw-away prototype or single usage app, you don't have to use RDBMS. Use object serialization, persistent hashtable, or OODBMS. Those tend to mesh well with the language you are using.