I tried this method, but found a small hindrance. Every time I add a record; I have to "re-populate" my hash. The possibility of having duplicate group numbers in my SRCFILE is high. This is minimal though. I can reduce the number of DB hits significantly by using this method.

On another note. I worked with one of our DBA's and loaded these records directly (and manually) into the database. We found "sub-second" response times (and that's FAST!).

Once I tried to automate the DB load with a korn script it brought me back up to the same performace as my original perl script. I think I'll stick with the
query-hash-evaluate-insert-query-hash method.

Thanks for everyones help on this.