It seems like your most important question is "what database am I going to use?". Which isn't really a Perl question. It's not an easy question to answer. Don't listen to people who just say "oh, just use mysql", they clearly don't know much about databases - anyone who suggests a database without knowing anything about the data being stored is not someone you should listen to.

I'm not going to suggest any database, as you have given way too little information. You have to ask yourself a couple of questions. How much data do you have? How important is your data? What kind of queries are you going to perform? How important is your data? Will there be many updates? How important is your data? Is it mostly a transaction system (many inserts/updates), or a decision system (big, complicated queries)? How important is your data? How fast does it have to be? How important is your data?

Note that I keep hammering on one particular question. If your data is really important to you, you do need a database that will garantee you integerity and consistency of your data, atomic actions, etc, even if disks crash or if someone pulls the plug. If your data isn't important, why even bother? Oh, and one often suggested database, which I won't mention but it has 5 letters and is often written in mixed case, doesn't offer you those vital features. "Free and fast" doesn't equal "good".

As for Perl, the most common interface to a database is with DBI and a driver specific to the choosen database. DBI gives you a bit of a primitive interface, as it's aimed at the lowest common denominator. The upside is that it has drivers for (almost?) all of the popular database engines. O'Reilly also has a book about it.

Abigail

In reply to Re: databases by Abigail-II
in thread Which DB for Windows, and how to design music DB (was: databases) by Anonymous Monk

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