Depending on what you're doing, plain old Storable + apl's suggestion of a hash of arrays or something will be very zippy and easy. There are other non-SQL DB solutions like DB_File (needs Berkeley DB underneath) or, probably much better, DBM::Deep. Like kyle said, SQLite is the way to go if you need SQL. I'd say unless you plan to transition the app/script to a real database eventually, you probably don't (unless you're much better with SQL than with Perl data structures, in which case it would save you dev time).