[WingedPanther]

FireBird is a good database that was open-sourced from Borland's Interbase DB. You can really use most any DB, however. The real question, however, is what do you want to create? Using a database for a calculator program, for instance, makes almost no sense.

Do you know the basic programming constructs? Loops, if-then-else, etc? Will you have to create new components or just use the ones that are part of Delphi? Have you done any Delphi/Pascal programming in the past? How about Java (you can carry over a LOT of Java concepts to Delphi)?