Let me try and rephrase what has been said in a way that will hopefully be of more help to you.

The type of information you are attempting is best implemented with a database. Databases are designed exactly for the problem you are attempting to solve and using one will make your lookups much easier. A properly installed, configured, and implemented database on an adequate system will have no problem meeting your performance needs. Whether your database would be properly installed, configured, and implemented on an adequate system is not a question this forum can answer.

If you feel that you cannot use the database solution, it is possible to solve the problem with a hash. A hash can also easily handle the problem set (100k records), assuming the system has adequate resources. You would need to key the hash by whatever unique value you have (group id?), possibly using a HoH (hash of hashes). Because your lookup values (phone numbers) are not unique, you will have to deal with the complexities of duplicate matches, etc, in your code (instead of letting a database do this for you).

Once you have chosen one of these options, this forum can help you to progress. It cannot help you to choose which of them is appropriate, since your unique environment is not known (and that's really beyond the scope of perl help anyway).

In reply to Re^7: how to define key for a hash by jrsimmon
in thread how to define key for a hash by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.