You mentioned that the data would take a while to load, but I think you'll find that it's not necessary to load the entire data into memory all the time.

It is a a small design system; a small change somewhere will propagate to other places. This is according to a design which is loaded, so the program can't understand what to do (-: probably mappable to the halting problem, or something. :-)

My application probably won't have a problem with (de)serializing. The standard approach will work splendidly.

But it could be used for other applications and if you go a factor of ten in complexity against what I've done -- I think you really don't want to tear it down and rebuild the data model for every small mod.

So I'm afraid that in my case, the standard solution won't scale. (-: But I'll give up solving the problems of 2006 now. :-)

Thanks for the help, everyone! :-D

Have to find a job with Perl. Monks and the language is wonderful fun.