Dear Monks,
I have an object oriented data structure with singleton objects. These objects hold a number of database rows as as a kind of parent. I now want to create a function that matches such objects individually. For eaxample for a table with drinks I would like to get all drinks, that are without sugar but are black.
My database contains a couple of thoiusands of such objects. I have a function calles match that receives a hash with the column name and the content.

my $ret = $src_drinks->match( { sugar => "no",
                                color => "black" } );
[download]

does what an equal SQL query

SELELCT * FROM drinks WHERE sugar LIKE "no" AND color LIKE "black";
[download]

would do.
My match function is as follows:

# sub match
# return all objects that match the requested options
sub match{
  
  my ( $self, $hashref ) = @_; 
  
  my @keys =  keys %{ $hashref };
  
  if ( ( @keys == 1 ) && defined( $self->{ _matched }->{ $keys[0]."@".
+$hashref->{ $keys[0] } } ) ) {
    return  $self->{ _matched }->{ $keys[0]."@".$hashref->{ $keys[0] }
+ };
  }
  
  # STEP 2: now go through all objects and return ptr to list of match
+ed objects or 0, if none found.
  my @ret;
  
  foreach my $obj ( @{ $self->get_data() } ) {
    
    my $equals = 1;
    
    foreach my $key ( @keys ){
      my $s = "\$obj->get_".$key."()";
      $equals = 0 unless ( $hashref->{ $key } eq eval( $s ) );
    }
    
    push ( @ret, $obj ) if ( $equals == 1 );
  }
  
  if ( @ret == 0 ){ 
    return 0; 
  }
  
  $self->{ _matched }->{ $keys[0]."@".$hashref->{ $keys[0] } } = \@ret
+ if ( @keys == 1 );
  return \@ret;
}
[download]

This is extremely slow. Due to hundreds of calls to eval. Does anyone have any ideas how to speed things up a bit, without changing the whole data structure?
As you can see I have speeded up the whole process by saving all "single-column" matches, this is currently not memory critical but might become so I might really need to get anything faster to come around getting rid of this performance bit either.

---

---

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.