From static to dynamic

I have a site which consists of a few hundred catalog pages. The items in the catalog are pictured 9 to a page with accompanying descriptions. The homepage features an item-of-the-day, as well as the past 3 featured items. The entire site is static and regularly updated manually by me. I don't believe it'll take much to fully automate the site, which is what I plan to do, or have done, over the next week or so. Now for my questions: 1. The dynamically-generated pages must remain indexable by search engines. That is, indexing robots must be able to crawl the entire site by following the various links to all of the catalog pages. Do the strings that are passed through the URL appear to search engines as dynamic, and therefore get ignored? 2. It's important that the site remain easily portable from one host to another. I have no plans to move it, but it would be nice to know that it would be a simple matter of plunking it down somewhere else if I needed to. Is there any advantage to using a flat file over mysql in terms of portability? How significantly would performance be affected, considering that it's not likely there will ever be more than 1000 catalog items (rows)? I'd be interested in hearing how you'd put this together. Steven