I did look at DBM::Deep. It is a very impressive and simple piece of work. If I were to implement a DBM-based datastore, I would definitely choose DBM::Deep over DB_File and its ilk.

There is something seductive about flat-files, however. I can open them in a text editor and edit them without requiring a Perl or web interfacec to get to them.

To that end, my question devolves into -- how can I maintain the metadata also in one file? Right now I have the MainFile and its shadow .MainFile. If I want to change something about the MainFile, I have to open one or the other or both. It would be nice to do it all in one place. I tinkered with something like (contents of a supersized MainFile below) -- 

MainFile
This is the MainFile. Blah blah blah.

__METADATA__
key:value
key:value
key:value

[download]

But I couldn't figure out a efficient and elegant way of reading that in and separating the data from the metadata, returning the metadata in a hash.

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to Re^2: Moving from SQL to flat-files by punkish
in thread Moving from SQL to flat-files by punkish

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