Paul Russell (Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, Cambridge) works with complicated early Irish glossaries with connections that are often fuzzy and phonetic rather than precise. When he went to create a database to handle these data, the only option seemed to be a bespoke one. In this presentation, he describes some of the challenges leading up to the creation of his database, the benefits of having it now, and the ongoing challenges of maintaining and improving it as time goes by.