As long as you don't want to do recalculations (as in deviations from the mean, or percentages from the max) you can stick with a database-less solution.

If you already know that you want the last lines of your database, why don't you just use ' open DATA, "tail -n $number $filename|";'? That would speed up things, as perl doesn't have to work the whole file.

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)