To answer your title question - Yes perl can create a searchable db.

To more fully answer your question would require a whole lot more dialog about your requirements, your goals and your expectations. You can easily create something like this in perl with a single (or few scripts) but it may not scale well (mutliple people modifying the report, large number of reports can kill simplistic searches).

Do you need a web server? I don't know. From you original post about using Flash, I immediately thought web. But since I have a healthy disdain for flash, I have no idea wether or not it can create standalone apps or not. The part about "sending" data to the scripts implied CGI (and hence web), but once again, maybe Flash has hooks that allow you to create standalone apps that are CGI-like. Or maybe not - I don't know. You could do the while thing as a GUI (Tk,WK,Win32,etc) app if all the client machines accessing the data have perl (and the necessary modules) installed.

A simple thing like this can quickly bloom into a full scale Document Management System. Most of the monks here make their living doing such work and while most (if not all) would be glad to help you tweak or understand such a system, few have the time to help you build one from scratch.

My advice would be to start small using a webserver. Create the forms and scripts to just save data to a centralized data store. Work on adding, deleting and updating this data and then move on to searching. You're first going to run into configuration issues such as where can I save data on the webserver? (Hint it may not be that m drive you talk about or maybe the webserver sees the m drive as something else). You may want to peruse the book stores and check out CGI Programming - especially the chapters on Data Persistence and Maintaining State.

Sorry if I sound a bit preachy but that's a tall order you're asking for (even though it sounds quite simple).

-derby