generally is this good idea in at all, what do you think people?

At some point, you have to accept the fact that flat-files are a very inefficient database format, but yes, compression can help quite a bit. I added compression support to CGI::Search in version 0.5, and some simple benchmarks I ran against one of our real-world flat-file databases showed a 12-fold increase in speed. I don't think I have the benchmarking code around anymore, though, sorry. YMMV, especially since compression rates aren't guarenteed.