First of all, do you have an index for your table? If not, that might explain why looking up a single record takes a lot of time.

But anyway, a mere 25000 records is simple to hold into memory in Perl all at once. So my advice is: select all data from the table, and read it all into a Perl data structure, for example, HoH, where the keys are your key field, and the values are the records, as hashes. That will not take more than a few seconds. Next, go through this structure one at a time, and insert the data into the output database.

I've noticed that outputting all data to a text file, like CSV, may be quite a bit swifter, which you can then import into your dB using an import tool.

In reply to Re: Searching and sorting a large DBF file by bart
in thread Searching and sorting a large DBF file by tyndyll

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