> I suggest "flattening" your hierarchical structure to a flat table.

Your approach implies that the data is essentially analog to a DB table. But you are losing the possibility to index the data by "zip" (?) or "state" with a hash lookup.

> Searching a table like that is simple,

I don't see why using 3 nested while each loops are more complicated. It's pretty generic and keeps all data available. (Though you have to take care not to mess up the each iterator)

> but does cost in performance because you have to examine each row for every search.

Hmm, if I wanted to represent a DB table I'd use an AoA with associated index hashes.

I'm pretty sure this can already be found° on CPAN.

Probably as object or tied array.

I'm not very experienced with NoSQL but this might go into the same direction.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

°) a cursory look revealed Data::Table not sure if that's a good example though.

In reply to Re^2: Get all hash value into array by LanX
in thread Get all hash value into array by Magnolia25

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