Very grateful for your insightful response, graff. I think you've sold me on the require approach, since the bigger problem might be that I could lose referential integrity if the database table got corrupted. The permission system with Postgres is not as detailed as MySQL, and it may make more sense from a performance standpoint for the production system to have .pm files anyway for frequently used code snippets.

Would something like AUTOLOAD be useful in this scenario?

SSF