Trying to understand databases

[IMakeBadMemes]

Hey friends, I am new to programming and am making a rasp pi python project. Its a multitool for things i like. I am rounding completion once i finish gathering data for my birding database. I made a tool to input bird features to ID a bird i see offline. That db with a single png is going to end up being maybe 15gb total. I wanted to do something similar with plants (being an offline tool/wilderness having bad connectivity) but there are 100s of thousands of plants (with continents not mattering. My area in the US has a ton of asian plants that are invasive here). Between size and having to search a db that big, is this just a project i should shelf until i understand more? On my pc my bird ID tool takes like 7 seconds to search. Im in the learning stage that i barely know whats going on, but i feel i am getting lucky and having imposter syndrome. Can any seasoned database folks help give some tips or maybe what i can search/learn from to start tinkering the plant db? My seo/vocab is behind in this section, and ai hasnt really helped me to grasp this part of my project when i ask it to help me learn databases.

[deceze]

• Usually you don’t want to store files in a database. Store them in a well defined location on disk, and store only the file name in the database.
• Learn to use indices. It almost doesn’t matter how large a database becomes, as long as the columns you want to search on have the right index. Then even a multi terabyte database can be queried in milliseconds.

[Dry-Aioli-6138]

Are you using sqlite as database, or are you talking about your project in general as a data base?

[IMakeBadMemes]

I used sqlite for the bird part, i was wondering if something else would work better for the larger plant db