Sticking information into a RDBMS is a good idea in my experience, here's some reasons:

• It gives you a data model that's independent of your language and application, and potentially even RDBMS software. This can be very useful if you ever need to switch languages, which has been known to happen.
• For projects that grow to be large, you can use an separate machine as your database server.
• It's a solution that's well understood by people who develop software, which is a good thing if your code will ever be maintained and built upon by others.

On the other hand, sometimes throwing things in a full-blown RDBMS is overkill, and Perl hashes are very very fast. So, like many things it depends on your situation. I really think that knowing both ways of storing data is extremely valuable, it's part of fully grokking TIMTOWDI. :)

"There's lots of functionallity in relational databases that can be leveraged against. (Aside: any English whizzes like to correct or corroborate my use of 'leveraged' there?)"

Don't end a sentence in a preposition without mentioning to the object of the preposition! To quote Winston Churchill, "This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put." :)

If I were to re-write your sentence, I would write somethng like this:

Relational databases have a lot of functionality that can be leveraged to speed up development.