Cons: Need to extract a reference to work on and save it back to the file.

Whatever solution you use its going to involve refereneces, so that can't be a con, since it's a given

Also, you don't have to work with references if you use Data::Alias

Is this good, bad, and/or ugly ?

Um, poop :)

Some links you might look at

Re: persistent object framework

http://poop.sourceforge.net/, Survey of POOP Modules (draft; please do not vote or reply)

Booking.com announces Sereal google serialization library code generator Sereal Re: Perl examples / tutorials for learning Apache Thrift with Perl , protobuf-perl - Protocol Buffers for Perl - Google Project Hosting, RPC, protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format - Google Project Hosting, Sereal - a binary data serialization format, Google::ProtocolBuffers

OOPS

update: supposedly better than MLDB is DBM::Deep - A pure perl multi-level hash/array DBM that supports transactions

FlexBaseDB™ — Pure Perl Database Engine