I'm pretty new to the whole node.js thing (as well as servers, javascript and the internet in general). I'm setting up a node.js server and I want to be able to create user accounts.
Assumption 1: This requires using a database of some sort.
At first I was going to go with mySQL because it's the first DBMS I could think of and it's open source and there's a node.js module for it. But reading through stack overflow and other sites, everyone is talking about using mongoose, redis and other things.
What should I use? Why should I use it? How far away from making sense am I?
Redis is a fast key-value store which is great for something like session. I see a lot of MongoDB with Mongoose in the community but I am more of a CouchDB person myself.
If you like learning new stuff you can try a few of them and see which one you like. If you have a deadline and you know MySql I would just stick with that for now.
MongoDB is a good choice. I'm a huge fan of Redis myself (even for a small, everyday DB).
If you don't need an ORM type modeling for your data, I suggest MongoJS or Mongoskin. They both make it really easy to interface with MongoDB with very little code.
If this is for a project that you are just building on your local machine for learning, then mongodb with mongoose and mongoose-auth can give you a pretty quick start.
If you are planning to deploy this to production somewhere you should find out what your hosting provider offers. If you have not picked a hosting provider checkout Heroku. They offer PostgreSQL and they make it really easy to deploy your app without having to worry about server setup and config, etc.