This doesn't address your issue, but it's a side note I thought I would toss in. About a year ago, I worked on a project for a company using a multi-value database. The multi-value industry (Pick, UniVerse, UniData) offers relational databases that violate the first normal form¹ and have built-in mechanisms for dealing with it.

Since these databases are not very popular, there was no support for it on CPAN. After posting to a couple of newsgroups, my boss found a guy who had used Perl to write a UniData driver that was perfect for our needs. Of course, he just gave us the driver. Had we gone to the vendor to get one written in C, we could have spent a few thousand dollars (and needless to say, it didn't use DBI).

I love Perl :)

Cheers,
Ovid

1. The first normal form basically states that you shouldn't have repeated data in one field, you should move it to a separate table. A multi-value database allows you to have a table with one person having 17 phone numbers in one field and handles updating and deleting values and their relationships automatically. Such a database is rather nice as linking tables are far less necessary. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any information on how to design these databases.

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