Thanks everyone. OK, lesson learned the hard way about database versus custom-rolled-basic-Perl. Honestly, for this application, it'll be a judgement call, because speed really is very very important.

Perrin - thought this would be a god summary of these investigations that could serve as future reference for someone else some day.

And I'm very interested in getting DB2 to work 'much faster' than DB1 - but something is clearly eluding me. Will do more research over the weekend.......