I ignored the CGI aspect of your original question. CGI complicates things significantly and it is hard to know the best approach to suggest taking without asking several questions.

• Do you expect many people to access this CGI program at the same time?
• Must responsive must it be to new information?
• What limits do you have on the size of the dataset you will be working with?
• How else will you need to access the data?

Etc. etc. etc. You might consider saving the output to a temporary file as suggested by an anonymonk here. That's good advice but it could work against you if you need to quickly have access to the newest entries.

I think that, in order for us to really be helpful, you'll need to better explain your requirements.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

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