I used QWERTY with two fingers and could not get myself to to touchtype with all fingers. Switching to DVORAK helped retrain. I use two finger (looking at the keyboad) typing on QWERTY and ten finger (blind) on DVORAK.
consider using sqlite made for being an allmost universal fileformat also allowing transactions. Its fully
ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability)
and even allows concurrent access (serializes writes)
it's probably the most deployed "database" (thousends of embedded devices, it's the fs one some ;-) .
If you really want scalability take a look at Erlang
though ErlyWeb (erlyweb.org/) is not that mature, Yaws (yaws.hyber.org) really is. Ruby and Ruby on Rails are really great for development i had never been that productive. Rails seems to scalo quite ok wenn adding more servers and rewriting som/lots of code. In an feature product I seed more safety and scalebelity so I will implpmpnt it in Erlang