i'm taking the newbie approach to looking through your data for criteria that fit your demands. how about a hash of hashes. i mentioned it before, but i didnt have a good example of it. here is my take on it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my %friends = (
                c => {
                        hair => "brown",
                        eyes => "brown",
                },

                g => {
                        hair => "blonde",
                        eyes => "green",
                }
);

print "$friends{g}{eyes}\n";
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i've got a simple print function, but you can easily put in an if statement that loops over your hash and prints output based on the matches that you would have been grepping out before. in your example, you were looking for every friend that had a name beginning with J and brown eyes:

for my $i(keys %friends) {
  print $i
    if ($friends{$i}{eyes} eq "brown" && $i =~ /^J/);
}
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no guarantees on that if statement, but if you're not planning on using DBI, then this might provide the output, if not the speed you're looking for.

c