xbot has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Generally, which is better for a simple database with relatively few keys, a tied hash db file or a tied key/value txt file?

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Re: simple db efficiency
by chromatic (Archbishop) on May 03, 2001 at 05:06 UTC
    That depends on what you mean by "better".

    Will you be inserting more often than retrieving? Do you want to be able to edit the file with a text editor? Are you looking for speed or ease of use? Do you need to be able to sort and search? What kind of memory constraints do you have?

    In general, I'd personally use a DBM file. I find that the MLDBM module comes in very handy in many situations.

    You can edit a text file with your text editor, if you're careful to get delimiters correct. I hate having to write parsers for that sort of thing though, so I'd look at GDBM or DB_File for most cases instead.

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Re (tilly) 1: simple db efficiency
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 03, 2001 at 16:05 UTC
    I am partial to pretty-printed Data::Dumper output that I can load into a hash with do. That approach leads to a data structure that is trivial to load and dump and easy to work with.

    And if the database can grow, well it is easy to convert it to a dbm later.

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