Any DBM file or shared memory caching will be infinitely faster than making a DB round trip.
Actually, it turns out that this is no longer true. MySQL is really fast these days. A simple query on a local MySQL is faster than just about anything except IPC::MM or BerkeleyDB (using built-in locking).
MLDBM::Sync is still fast enough for most uses, and faster than a complex query (joins or multiple items in the WHERE clause) on most databases.
If the data in question is small enough to fit in memory and doesn't need to be updated while the server is running, there are instructions in the Guide as well as the books about how to preload the data during startup.
- Perrin
-- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html
