I'd like to get some community consensus on a good design to be able to store and query word frequency counts. I'm building an application in which I have to parse text inputs and store how many times a word has appeared (over time). So given the following inputs:

• "To Kill a Mocking Bird"
• "Mocking a piano player"

Would store the following values:

Word    Count
-------------
To      1
Kill    1
A       2
Mocking 2
Bird    1
Piano   1
Player  1

And later be able to quickly query for the count value of a given arbitrary word.

My current plan is to simply store the words and counts in a database, and rely on caching word count values ... But I suspect that I won't get enough cache hits to make this a viable solution long term.

Can anyone suggest algorithms, or data structures, or any other idea that might make this a well-performing solution?