Like mirod said at YAPC::Europe this year, using XML for a database is essentially like using plain text, only slower. I'd say sri's suggestion of DBD::SQLite is the way to go, but you could also parse a tab-delimited (or whatever-delimited) file in the same way, one line per record like my @row = split( /\t/, $_ ) while (<>).

I hope that helps.

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Allolex