I don't know of any ready-to-go solution. The *SQL way may be not so bad after all. The interfaces are nice, and the performance is a non-issue with modern systems. But if you insist, it's not difficult to implement. Just use a pipe (or any character that is garanteed to be not used in the fields) to make strings of the 2nd-level info.

use Some_DB_that_you_like;
tie %db Some_DB_etc;

my $two_level_hash = $what_ever_your_data;

for my $key_one (keys %$two_level_hash){
   my @vals = values %{ $two_level_hash->{$key_one} };
   my $item = join '|', @vals;
   $db{ $key_one } = $item;
}
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..to populate your DB; You can fetch items in a similar fashion with split;

Hope this helps,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)