If you are looking for simple hack-friendly solutions, you can serialize (i.e. store) arbitrary data structures to disk and read them again the next time with something like YAML::LibYAML.

As long as your program needs to access the whole database anytime it wants to draw the earth you might as well slurp the entire hash in one go from file to memory (or use one file per day if you want a nice way to segment the data or invalidate or overwrite old data) instead of using a database.

The best thing, the data on disk is human-readable, so there is always the possibility to use emacs grep and less to edit, view or search your data.

Performance should be a bit slower than Tie, but you don't have to think about how to store more complicated data structures like hashes of arrays. YAML does that for you.

Also this solution is a bit low on scalability, but as long as your data doesn't go into tens of megabytes you are on the safe side. And you can always upgrade to a database, if you need to scale up or need a more 'random access' on the data.

In reply to Re: More than one way to skin an architecture by jethro
in thread More than one way to skin an architecture by mcoblentz

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