in reply to Keeping hash table in memory

Have you looked at AnyDBM_File? You can choose to employ one of the particular DBM flavors described there, or you can just use AnyDBM_File; and apply whichever flavor was built in as the default for your perl installation.

I posted a simple demonstration of the latter approach a few years back: Re: what is anydbm_file?. Nice thing about it: it's part of the perl core distro.

HTH