Thanks for the distinction between Storable and DBM::Deep. I guess I was thinking more in terms of what Storable does than an actual database, or specifically one that is accessed by multiple programs/users concurrently. I was looking at it as an easy way of storing complex data so it could be retrieved later, one piece at a time.

My observation on overhead wasn't just in terms of cpu but also the significant difference in file size. Will increasing the input data size from 36 K to 360 K result in a database size increase from 4 megs to 40 megs? But I assume there is an initial overhead that won't be changed much by an increase in number of records or an increase in record size.

Thanks for the information on perl databases. It's something I am going to have to dig deeper into.