I was using the words pack and unpack without regard for their Perl meanings, and then realized I might as well link them as one of the many ways Perl makes it easy to fetch and store data. I don't recommend using any Perl function or Perl itself for the heavy lifting part of database development. Although by carefully crafting your own indexes, and storing your data in fairly discrete, delimited text files, you can easily put together a relatively simple system, but it won't have near the flexibility that using Perl in conjunction with some other package would.