I think the main issue in using your own text file that is likely to be accessed in read/write mode by multiple apache processes is flock. DBD::CSV seems to handle that part. The answer to your question lies in the urgency of your project, I think. If you don't have a hard deadline on it, why not do it both ways, learn, compare and tell us? Cheers :)
Comment on Re: To learn to search flat files or to cheat...
Well it's my own website, and I'm quite lazy, so naturally i'm not going to set a deadline for myself :-).
My next question would be: where can I learn to search a flat text file (flock issues aside) using regexen or some such method? (modules such as File::Data have a search method, but even then you have to provide a regexp to match against)