I'm playing with multiplayer stuff at the moment and I'm wondering about the best way to do something.

I want to store information about players on a server (this server actually!) and need to be able to retrieve and update records from a client application. I could use the mysql database that DGDev uses but I would have to use PHP or similar to access the tables and then download the result (is that true?).

I can't run an app on the server so maybe I should FTP plain text files for each user. I'd only be reading and updating these files when my client starts up.

What's the best way to do it?