I see your point(s). However this data doesn't change often, and is fairly complex (ie would involve a number of tables with one-to-many, m-to-o and o-to-o relationships. In short, a database solution would require signifficant development time as opposed to a few lines of Config::General creating a fully usable complex data structure that needs little or no maintenance and is simple to backup and modify.

Second, what I need to retain here is only the order at which the keys were inserted. This works perfectly via the -Tie parameter when reading, just not when writing (see bart's post below).

So by your database analogy, I need "SELECT * FROM tbl" -- no sorting or other magic, if I could simply keep the tie during save I'd be happy ;-)