But if he's going to search all the records to match on some set of criteria, won't he have to load the whole thing in memory anyway?

No. All he has to do to find the cars with make = 'volvo' (or some normalized key like 'make_7') is say my $cars = $make_db{'volvo'} and have that return a ref to an array of car IDs (serialized by Storable). Then he does the same for each of the other criteria, and finds the overlapping set.

You do access records by ID, because you make multiple indexes (dbm files) which are each using a different criterion of the search as a key. It's kind of a roll-your-own MySQL.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Question about properly laying out a database by perrin
in thread Question about properly laying out a database by Stamp_Guy

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