Thanks, NetWallah.
I've heard about the firefox squlite manager addon before and took a mental note to try it sometime. I might try that. It looks like it won't be able to handle anything like my full dataset or even a tenth of it, but I could use it to play with databases.
Do you have any input on the pros and cons of sqlite+DBI (or any other perl module) versus Solr? For instance, how about portability? Can either be packed into an exe with par packer? Would every user need to install sqlite or other software separately?