Well, I decided to axe the 'simple, light' requirement and I just went ahead and installed a full LAMP stack in a virtual machine. I've started diving in with MySQL, and I must say that it's not quite as hard as I thought it was. I've managed to achieve my goal of downloading the JSON feed and inserting the data into a couple tables, and I'm starting to learn how to manipulate the data in such a way that I can get the results out of it that I was interested in finding. I think the biggest advantage of changing from "something light" to a full blown Apache/MySQL/PHP installation is just the quantity of documentation and tutorials available for everything. Thanks for the suggestions anyway, though!