I'm with BrowserUK on this one. Unless you need the sophistication of PDL on this, and it wouldn't seem that you do, then the read it all in approach is really a good one.

One of my clients collects huge amounts of data, after it is about 6 months old the chance of any single record being required again is about 1 in 10^-6 per year. So we archive the data in pipe-delimited files (more storage efficient than CSV) and store it on an archive server. Files will be from 20 - 800mb each.

When I took over managing their system about 4 years ago thery were using "find text in a file" from the Windows explorer to look into the archives. I asked how long it takes to search and they said, oh, between 16 and 48 hours! Oops! So I did a very similar thing to the suggestion from BrowserUK and found we could search the archive drive in 2 to 3 hours. The beauty is that I can run about 20 searches concurrently before we see serious degradation (it is a quad xeon box now running linux which is vastly faster than the w2k server it was on until about 12 months ago) and the operators have a little Tk window which sends a request to the server which does the search and sends them back an email when it is done. They love it! Totally of about a day's work.

IMHO - this is a wonderful task for Perl.

jdtoronto

In reply to Re: is perl the best tool for this job ? by jdtoronto
in thread is perl the best tool for this job ? by spurperl

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.