I found your program logic a bit overly complex. In particular, this $switch stuff is not needed. I show another way below. Your code does work, but you have asked for suggestions so I feel free to do that. I also incorporated the suggestion from moritz to do this line by line instead of building an array.

I call a subroutine to print the record instead of using a local variable like $switch to keep track of whether or not we are inside of a record. My "while" statement in print_record() may look at bit obtuse, but it just loops until a line with only whitespace is found (a blank line).

You asked: Is there a more optimized way to achieve the same?. To me the most important optimization you can make is clarity of the code.

A few peformance comments: The code below will run basically as fast as you can read in the input data file. If you want to terminate the reading of input data after a single record is found, there are a number of ways to deal with that like like even just putting an exit(0) in the print_record() sub.

There are a number of ways to optimize and organize a multiple record search in a single pass through the data file. But I'm not sure that this is a requirement for you? The single most important performance issue when dealing with a large sequential data set is how many times you have to read it. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while ( <DATA> )
{
    print_record ($_) if /.*?10.72.184.159:disk_data_written.*/;
}

sub print_record
{
   my $time_stamp_header = shift;
   print " The timestamp array consists of :\n".
         "$time_stamp_header";
         
   while ( (my $line =<DATA>) !~ /^\s*$/) 
   {
      print $line;   #prints lines until a blank line
   }
}

=output of the above
 The timestamp array consists of : 
Timestamp       10.72.184.159:disk_data_written
-----------------------------------------------------
2010-01-05 22:49:03     47.467
2010-01-05 22:50:04     43.148
2010-01-05 22:51:03     47.186
2010-01-05 22:52:03     45.867
2010-01-05 22:53:03     47.333
2010-01-05 22:54:03     47.067
2010-01-05 22:55:03     42.400
2010-01-05 22:56:03     46.533
=cut


__DATA__
Timestamp       10.72.184.159:cpu_busy
--------------------------------------------------
2010-01-05 22:49:03     1.707
2010-01-05 22:50:04     1.753
2010-01-05 22:51:03     1.994
2010-01-05 22:52:03     1.726
2010-01-05 22:53:03     1.783
2010-01-05 22:54:03     1.733
2010-01-05 22:55:03     1.742
2010-01-05 22:56:03     1.902
2010-01-05 22:57:03     1.902

Timestamp       10.72.184.159:disk_data_written
-----------------------------------------------------
2010-01-05 22:49:03     47.467
2010-01-05 22:50:04     43.148
2010-01-05 22:51:03     47.186
2010-01-05 22:52:03     45.867
2010-01-05 22:53:03     47.333
2010-01-05 22:54:03     47.067
2010-01-05 22:55:03     42.400
2010-01-05 22:56:03     46.533

Timestamp       10.72.184.159:disk_data_read
---------------------------------------------------------
2010-01-05 22:49:03     13.467
2010-01-05 22:50:04     10.557
2010-01-05 22:51:03     10.712
2010-01-05 22:52:03     10.733
2010-01-05 22:53:03     10.667
2010-01-05 22:54:03     12.667
2010-01-05 22:55:03     10.133
2010-01-05 22:56:03     10.000
2010-01-05 22:57:03     10.133

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In reply to Re: Optimum method to perform data extraction in a table by Marshall
in thread Optimum method to perform data extraction in a table by perlpal

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