I need to wholeheartedly agree with perrin. Rather than go the route of ripping out the basis upon which scalability is established (your RDBMS), why not merely replace it with one that fits your needs better?

At least maintaining your SQL so that you can scale again later is a huge start - jZed's suggestion to use DBD::File or other similar modules that allow you to use plain SQL to access data in otherwise flat files would tide you over allowing you to get back up and running with a minimum of fuss while allowing you to continue investigating a more robust solution (no offense intended, jZed) should the need actually be there.

Popular alternatives are mySQL and PostgreSQL, both in the free realm. But I've also heard that MS SQL, Oracle, and DB2 all have free-for-production-use server products available as well, with all the consummerate feature enhancements and full scalability of being able to upgrade (for a price) to their larger-scale offerings should it be needed (including high availability failovers, clustering, etc.).

Rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I urge you to reconsider. Using flat files as an intermediary makes sense (especially if it's CSV format which is often importable directly into most other RDBMS formats). But using it for production code is somewhat scary. Personally, I think I'm pretty smart. But I definitely have not taken the time to understand everything that a database offers me. I'm just happy to take advantage of it. In fact, in the production of a website built to track test plan progress, my manager not only told me not to do it, but not to use a database in doing it. (I don't quite remember how the latter point came up given the former.) So I started with flat files. But then I started worrying about concurrency and ... well, then I just went ahead and used a database (DB2, actually). And I didn't have any problems with multiple users logging their tests and overwriting each other. Without spending any time on it (other than learning DB2).

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

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