Database Support?

Honestly, I've never done any database programming, heck, I've never really used database software. But on several occasions I have thought "gee thats an ugly list of data, surely I could view and edit it better in some kindof database - and it sure would be slick if torque just knew how to load it from that directly".

So, my question is...
Can stock Torque do this, or are there resources along these lines around?
Should I be looking into a particular type of database ( mySql / sqlLite seem to come up a lot ) ?