The DBI/DBD paradign supports lots of SQL databases. Failing that there
is gdbm.
On 12 Jan 2000, Marvin Simkin wrote:
> I hope this isn't too far off topic...
>
> I am designing and plan to write yet another "spider" based on libwww. (Yes I
> know there are many already.) This one is intended for internal management of
> a large complicated web presence spanning many hosts and domains. Thus it
> needs to know affiliated domains, hostnames, and related information, such as
> a way to group hosts. (Intranet, Public, Partner site, the-rest-of-the-world,
> etc.)
>
> With the thought that some of this code may make its way to CPAN some day, I
> would like to store this data in a form that offers maximum portability and
> standardization. I know there are many Perl modules to interface with a
> specific database, but databases aren't free and you can't count on everybody
> having access to the same brand.
>
> My current thinking is to write the data to pipe-delimited tables in flat
> files, since they're free and exist on most every platform. I know this will
> have drawbacks (how do you store data containing pipes, performance
> considerations if the files get large, no record locking...) but at least one
> could import the pipe delimited file into a database someday if desired. And,
> there's always grep, cut, and sort for ad-hoc reporting. Well almost always.
> ;)
>
> So I am soliciting comments on the wisdom of this course from more experienced
> CPAN developers. Is there a better or Perl-standard way that would still be
> fully portable and free? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
>
