New here, and a relatively new programmer in general. I've taken 3 years of programming in high school, including a year learning Python and two years learning Java, with one of those years at the AP level. I was recently hired for a summer job, and my company wants me to develop a database system to help them locate files which are stored in boxes in a warehouse.

So here's the basic premise of my problem

Boxes - they need to hold a bunch of information such as ID number, Barcode ID, location, company, etc, and they need to hold a list of files.

Files - They need to hold a bunch of information as well such as ID, date created...

The company wants things to be VERY searchable. As in they'll search for a file's title and they'll find what boxes it could be in, or they'll search for a Box and find what files are in it etc.

Being mostly a java programmer, though still a pretty inexperienced one, how I'd approach this in java conceptually would be to have an ArrayList of Box objects, which within them contain an ArrayList of files. However, storing this information and reading it repeatidly would seem to be quite complicated, as would creating a search mechanism, and well, it all just seems out of my league.

So, I figured working with Access would make sense. I've done some VERY minimal work in visual basic, I've probably forgotten just about all of it. My real issue is I have no idea how I'd organize this in Access, so if anyone could sort of point me in the right direction on this I'd be very grateful. It seems like MySQL would be a good idea here, but I know NOTHING about it and have been somewhat lost in tutorials...again I appreciate any ideas or suggestions, thanks.