You need to read about database normalisation.

Essentially, what you have here is not a large complicated data structure containing many fields, but a very simple data structure containing very few, as so:

table stats (
  jobid INT,
  try INT,
  item VARCHAR(255),
  value VARCHAR(255), # or maybe TEXT or equivalent
  PRIMARY KEY (jobid, try)
);
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Or similar. You would then be able to retrieve all the contents of the hash by:

select item, value from stats where jobid=273118 and try=1
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It also allows you to get nice aggregate stats as so:

select owner, count(*) as n from stats where try=1 group by owner orde
+r by n
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Which would give you a nicely sorted list of all the different owners in all the jobs, and a count of how many jobs they own.

Even better, its trivial to code for to load and unload from the hash..

foreach (keys %hash) {
    $dbi->do('insert into stats (jobid,try,item,value) (?,?,?,?)',$job
+id, $try, $_, $hash{$_});
}
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etc.

Read a good book on SQL, or if you alreayd know SQL decently, on database normali|sz|ation and what it means for your data structures.

Create them well, and the database will end up doing all the work for you.

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