Hi all.

This might be off topic for this group; if so please direct me to a
more
appropriate group.

I have 20 years of programming experience (hobby / personal scale)
and
am getting my feet wet with databases for the first time. The project
at
hand needs a database to handle large amounts of data. The data are
measured by sonar and amounts to the hundreds of GB, so one would
prefer to save the data on some binary format to save time on the
text <-> binary conversions.

The textbooks I have found on database theory solely deal with text
data, i.e. data that are stored as tables in text files, which I
suppose
is OK for educational purposes.

1) Where can I find material on 'real-life' databases which deal with
the
storage and handling of binary data?
2) Are there database implementations which are better suited for my
application than others? I would like to keep the application
platform
independent, and use C++ as my programming language.

Rune