I fully agree with your post. And I am quite often pis*ed off by posts here in the Monastery in which, facing a performance problem, some monk says: "Use a database". Wrong answer most of the time. A hash can be hundreds or even thousands of times faster than a DB.

I am dealing almost daily with various databases. The first thing I do, quite often, is to load a number of tables (especially the reference data) into hashes.