#3 use PEAR for database access

[Charles Lepple]

Not strictly necessary, but for those who aren't in the
MySQL camp, it might be nice to abstract the database
access (since we really don't do anything fancy).

A very good argument would be for sqlite access (to
avoid running a database manager process), but I'm not
sure that many PHP installations have sqlite linked in.

This could also be handled in a Python rewrite, where
they have the DBAPI for abstraction.