Yeah. Here’s a crash course located at the mysql website . But are you using mysql? And here’s a whole site dedicated to php and mysql.
As far as spry goes, spry is just an ajax framework. It cannot create data. It can retrieve and display it. You may want to look at this demo of spry which imports the rss feeds. You can create a form to submit it to an xml file, but reading thousands of entries from a flat file is more processor intensive – although xml is a flat file it may be treated differently since it has it’s own rules so it may be less intensive. But it can be done. You can check here for some quick info and you can try this from Kirupa
This here is exactly what you’re looking for, but in ASP so you’ll have to convert it to PHP, but it should work the same. This also does the same thing, but it’s not a tutorial so you’d have to do some legwork, but it is written for PHP. This should also be helpful.