What everone has stated above are valid issues...it's WHAT you want to do with it that is important.

If you are just looking for something that reads data from a flat file or even a custom file structure, DBI with DBD::AnyData works great (and is free). It has support for using user-defined FORMATs to access various types of file structures: CVS, Pipe, Tab, Fixed, HTML Table, MP3, Weblog, Password, etc. AnyData also support custom FORMATs, if you wanted to go that far. You can create a new FORMAT and AnyData could access the data structure based on the info in the format file.

Speed-wise I am not too sure about it. Most of my data bases are less than 1000 records in size so speed is not a BIG issue yet ;) I'm in the process of timing outputs from AnyData and MySQL...I'll try to post my results when I'm done.

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Sean Shrum
http://www.shrum.net