In terms of efficiency, the best advice I can give is to construct your SQL statements carefully. Retrieving all the rows and then filtering for a certain section using Perl is very inefficient. Let the database worry about section for you by only SELECTing where section is the one you're looking for.

It sounds like you could use a crash course in database design - it's too complicated to get into here. A quick Google search turned up a W3Schools SQL course but it doesn't really get into the design aspects of databases. I also turned up a howto article on Lycos' "webmonkey" site which looks much more promising.

Best of luck.

--
Grant me the wisdom to shut my mouth when I don't know what I'm talking about.


In reply to Re: Managing Inventory Sections with Perl and SQL by Ionizor
in thread Managing Inventory Sections with Perl and SQL by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.