Actually, flat files are not faster for large amounts of records...beyond that, as the data is pulled into your program you have to take extra measures to tie it all
together, whereas a RDBMS will already have all of the information related for you.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of things that you would have to do programatically with flat files you can do with the DB and it's built in methods.

• Sort the list? Use ORDER BY
• Get only unique values? Use DISTINCT
• Need to tie two tables together? Use JOIN
• Need transaction support? Use PostGre or SQLServer or Oracle and you have it.
• etc...

There are many benefits that come from using a RDBMS, and if ZZamboni wants his site to grow easier, then he should port to one. The investment is worth the
payoff later, and he gets to learn a whole new side of Perl he has not done yet.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.