You -could- do this with Perl, problem is you'll need to load all your data into memory to do efficient searching, and unless you want to keep it there (which will eat hundreds of MB of RAM minimum...), you'll have to recreate the hash every time you want to do a lookup, which probably won't be that fast either. I'd personally use a database if you're going to be doing more than a few searches per day or if your data updates often or if it has to be accurate in real time. If you search very infrequently and your data is more or less static, a Perl solution will work fine.

As always, giving us samples of your data is going to help if you want specific queries / code.

In reply to Re: Alternative to querying a database to save time by TJPride
in thread Alternative to querying a database to save time by smandape1

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.