Following up on what Liz said...

I was in a similar situation. Here's what I did:

• create the data table in the database
• create a module that turns the data into something I can play with (in my instance, a hashref, but constants are just as good - if a little less flexible whenever you want to embed them in strings :)
• use the module whenever I need to know any of the constants

And because it's under mod_perl, the code that builds the hashref is in a startup.pl that is called when Apache starts, so it's instantly available to my scripts, and DB calls are only made when the server starts.

cLive ;-)