Remote database for select2

Hi, I'm very much of a novice and could use some guidance.

In a survey, we are asking respondents to enter their occupation, and we want to use select2 to allow people to begin typing, then use AJAX to search through a database of about 48,000 occupation titles (and abbreviations or shortened versions) from the Department of Labor's ONET program (I currently have them in a csv file). For each occupation title, there is an SOC code and a OCC2010 code, so even though the respondent would select the text version of the title, on the back end we would want Qualtrics to store the text and the corresponding codes.

From other posts, it sounds like I should use select2, put the occupation titles and codes in an SQL database, and use php and ajax to pull options from the database after the respondent has typed a few letters. I'm just not quite sure how to do this. We have an AWS account, so can I create a database on AWS? Where is the php file stored? I've seen plenty of examples and looked through the code, but I'm not sure how to write the code to pull from files that I generate.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and guidance!