There are two possible solutions:

*DBM
Use dbm file with embeded data structures serialized. You may use MLDB for this purpose, but as it uses Data::Dumper it could be somewhat slow for your purposes (see Serialization uncovered). But the real pain in this are indexes. *DBM allow you only one key. You must maintain several other *DBM files with mappings of secondary keys to primary keys. And you must maintain them consistent. And if you want to do a substring search, there is no easy method except for linear search. And that could be terribly slow even for small database. One more problem with *DBM files is parallel access. You cannot open *DBM file for writing in two precesses. And if you do open/close scenario, data cannot be cached and the access is very inefficient.

database/directory
Use RDBMS (Oracle,MySQL,...). Choose some lighweighted one and it will have little impact on performance compared with programming comfor you gain. Or even better use a directory service, like LDAP. There is excelent open-source LDAP server: OpenLDAP. This will do all the dirty index/schema/caching things. There are at leas two modules on CPAN for LDAP access (Net::LDAP and perldap) and both works fine for me.

In reply to Re: Basic Database? by gildir
in thread Basic Database? by tomazos

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