I've created my own search engine, for a relatively small set of documents -- less than a hundred -- on my site.

I got the code basics from an old article on webmonkey, at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/97/16/index2a.html which you don't have to read to understand my questions, by the way.

Here they are:

• The author of the article puts his index into a database -- I didn't know how to do that, so I just have a flat text file index in the form:

apple,0,2,5,8
banana,2,3,4,5,8
...
zebra,4,5,6,7,8

where the numbers refer to an array of documents

• is there something inherently better about using a database, for a job of this size? I've got a 400Kb index for a few megs of HTML files.
• What's the DBM/Berkeley DB format (this is what he used in the article) and how does it compare to SQL? Is the Berkeley DB something that every self-respecting UNIX server should have, or is it likely to be optional?
• Where can I go to start learning how to make Perl talk to SQL, if it comes to that?
• When my script runs, it has to open the 400Kb index file and search it, and it does this for each word. Should I be opening and closing the file every time or somehow rewinding it?
• Is there a RAM issue with this approach? A speed issue?
• Where do all the old $_'s go?*
• The index just uses number to refer to the documents, as mentioned above -- in order to display titles and URLs I have a rather large list of URLs and another one for document titles, and I just dump them in as arrays:

  @filenames = qw (
  aaaaa.html
  aaaab.html
  ...
  zzzzz.html
  );

  - this is probably counterproductive when running the script too, isn't it? Should I maybe put them into their own text files and just read them in every time? Would that be a better or a worse approach than the one I'm using?

TIA,
Spike
* not a serious question, but I suppose I'm right in assuming Perl never holds an part of my 400Kb file in memory at all, except for the current line in $_?

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