I've been told that you should really only use a database if your data will be updated in some way by the end user. But what if your website is "static" in the sense that the user doesn't update anything?
For example maybe your website displays a map of the USA and you can click on each state, click on a few cities in each state and view data for those areas(population, demographics, climate history, whatever). Is a database in this situation appropriate? The user isn't updating anything but you can end up with some very large datasets depending on what information you want to display. Would a database be appropriate for something like this?