Firstly, forgive me - I'm pretty much a noob at C++, and only began re-learning it last week.

I'm trying to make a simple game (mostly as practice). I want to access a database so that I can read the definition of an item directly from there. If given the unique ID of an item (short int), I need to be able to use that to look up various statistics about the item, without having to load the entire list of items into the memory.

Thing is, I only need to read from the database - I don't need to write anything to it, so maybe there's a way other than databases that I could do this? My original idea was to use an XML file, but I figured a database might be better.

I'm using Microsoft visual C++ 2010 as my IDE/compiler. I know how to work with classes, arrays, structs, and other basics.

Any advice or links would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!