Flat files have the advantage of being easily accessible. Just start an editor and you can see and edit everything. But why use a database then? A database allows fast access to selected subsets of structured data (i.e. data you can put into rows and columns and every row has a similar item in a specific column)

But where is the structure of a hash or array you dumped with Data::Dumper? It is just one long string that you can store in a column of this table and read out one piece or write in one piece. Normally that can be done with a flat file faster and better.

So the question is, what do you hope to achieve better with a database than with flat files ?

It might be that many of the arrays are shared between different config files. Then Data::Dumper or YAML might make sense.

Or you need insertion or reordering inside the arrays a lot. Or maybe you are after statistical data. In those cases you would have to store each array element in a row of the database. Might make sense, but a bit far fetched.

As you can see I have a hard time finding reasons why a config file should be stored in a database. If you have a convincing reason we could tell you how to do it elegantly