title: Database design for storing temporary data to be used in code
body: <p>I am new to databases and so am having a little trouble thinking in terms of DB design. If this is not the correct place or way to ask this question, I will be happy to move it to the correct place if told.</p>
  
  <p>I am working on a problem where I go through multiple drives on multiple user machines and store a list of directories I want to use and another list I don't want to use for each volume. These directories can be quickly ascertained/verified so these will be modified over time. This is just a starting point to the actual problem I have to solve, which is doing more stuff on the files in the "to use" list above. The code that actually acts on these directories is a different service and so needs this list to use from somewhere.</p>
  
  <p>I am kind of stuck coming up with a way to store this in a DB on the backend. Since these directory lists are different for different users/volumes I do not know how long or how short this list will be. So do I store these in a DB or somewhere else? </p>
  
  <p>EDIT: To make the question a little more generic, if you have a variable number of data (strings) to be shared between two services during computation how do you store them? How do you create a table to store a variable number of items? In code its easy to just store them in a array you can malloc as the need changes. Its much easier to store them to a file but it does not work across services because these services can be located anywhere.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any pointers.</p>