in reply to SQL- for starters

If your data is already in tables created with DB_File, you can use DBD::DBM to access and modify them with SQL, it provides a SQL/DBI frontend to DBM files including the BerkeleyDB files created by DB_File. It's in the latest DBI distribution. You could also use it in conjunction with another DBD driver to dump from your existing files into PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, etc.