Limbic,

The files we receive are fixed length and many of the fields are not even used. A file may contain a dozen fields, but we may only need 2 or 3. Since these files are extracted from their database there is a lot of id matching to be done, which is mainly what the hashes do, such as $name_hash{'123'} = { first => 'John', last => 'Doe' };. Once all of the supporting files are hashed in this manner, a main script uses them as lookup tables. Therefore, every time it sees a record that has '123' in a certain field, it knows to use "John Doe" during the processing.

Having all of the data in memory is not necessary; however, I do not know how this could be done without using a database. Each record, from a few dozen to a few thousand, needs to use these supporting hashes.

Let me know if you need more information, I appreciate your help.

In reply to Re^3: Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by eff_i_g
in thread Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by eff_i_g

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