I'm new to website developing.
I want to develop a simple website with a search engine to search an MS Access database that contains indexed records with Word files.
Is it possible to develop such a website with JavaScript / Node.js?
Is there another free database that can contain records with Word files that you would recommend for such a website?
Thank you!
Yes, it is possible, e.g. by using the node-adodb module mentioned in this question: Accessing .mdb files through nodejs.
Anyway, I would not recommend it since Access was never meant to be a server database for web applications.
Consider one of the many alternatives, which are server databases, and which provide lots of additional features, e.g. PostgreSQL, MongoDB, … there are countless alternatives, and which one to choose is completely up to your requirements, and a quite different question and clearly out of scope here. But I think you get the idea.
Regarding Word files… basically it's just binary data, so any database that can store binary data (think BLOBs) should be fine, as long as you do not need any special "Word features". PostgreSQL is able to handle BLOBs, in MongoDB I'd suggest GridFS, but as said there are many, many alternatives out there.
What also may be useful is to have a look at projects such as Knex or Sequelize, which unify access to a variety of databases from Node.js.
As Himmel pointed out in the comment, it may be meaningful to convert the Word documents into JSON or XML, either before storing them, or additionally to storing the original files. Both, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, are capable of handling JSON out of the box. I'm not sure about their XML support, tbh.
