Do I need to store crawl output in a database?

Not necessarily.

It depends on what you want to do with the crawl output:

You probably don’t need a database if:

• You’re doing a one-time crawl
• You just need to export data to CSV/JSON/files
• The crawl output is small
• You don’t need searching, deduping, updates, or history
• You’re okay processing it immediately and then discarding it

A database is useful if you need:

• Persistence across runs
• Deduplication of pages/items
• Incremental crawling or change tracking
• Querying/filtering the results later
• Relational data (pages, links, metadata, statuses, errors)
• Large-scale crawls where memory/file handling gets messy
• Retrying failed pages and tracking crawl state

Common alternatives to a database:

• JSON/CSV files for simple storage
• SQLite for a lightweight local DB
• Key-value stores or object storage if you only need blobs
• Message queues + files for pipeline-style crawlers

Rule of thumb

• Simple, small, one-off crawl → files are fine
• Ongoing or repeated crawl → use a database, even SQLite can be enough

If you want, I can help you choose between CSV/JSON, SQLite, PostgreSQL, or just in-memory processing based on your crawl size and goal.