I'm currently working on a website that's accessing information on a server to produce the contents of a table with times and discriptions.

Being completely new to web design, I started off making the page.
It uses javascript and XMLHttpRequest to parse the data and put it in the table. I tested out filling the form with information from a simple .xml file. Now I want to start putting in real values and much larger amount of information, but writing it all by hand as an .XML file seems unpractical.

Would mySQL be a good way to store information like this? I don't really understand how I can safely access the information from the apache server. I read a little about using PHP to access mySQL but I don't know how to set that up safely. I'm worried that if I just start using a PHP module the databases will be open for anyone to drop the database.

What do you think is the best solution to get from XMLHttpRequest to a database? Thanks.