I am going to stick my oar in and say, why not just go to a RDBMS, which you may already have installed on your machine anyway? And if not, it won't be difficult.

Over a period of years I, my contractors, and staff, had written many applications where I found we had used BerkleyDB, SQLite, DBD::CSV and MySQL. In the end this introduced a hopeless mess of things on the servers which became a hopeless nightmare to maintain and back-up.

About two years ago I decided enough was enough - if it is in MySQL then we can maintain a single back-up strategy. So I have applications that have from 50 to 60,000,000 records, yep, that's right! All using MySQL and we don't have to worry. Even a 60 million record table doesn't take ALL that long to search.

In some applications, we even, horror of horrors according to some monks, store HTML templates in the database so we can use them from anywhere. This may not be music to the purist, but in an organisation where I usually only have one full-time staffer and maybe two or three piece-work contractors I need to keep things so I can maintain them and back them up with minimal fuss.

My MySQL gets backed up automatically every night, so I can be reasonably confident of my data security.

jdtoronto