note blue_cowdawg <ul><ul><i> I'm curious at a higher level how one goes about managing data like this once they have it. </i></ul></ul> <p> My first reaction is that you are probably over thinking this thing a bit. </p> <p> First off, a few things you need to consider no matter what path you take is <ol> <li> What are your short and long term goals for gathering this data in the first place? Answering this question may help you decided on a proper means of persisting the gathered data now that you have it. Flat text files? Sybase? MySQL? [http://nosql-database.org/|NoSQL]? Perhaps a combination of the two. </li> <li> What is the end product or products that are going to come out of this? </li> </ol> </p> <p> Once you have decided a strategy then go forward with it. If you are queasy at the thought of working with SQL then I'd partner with someone skilled in it and let them figure out your table schema and even write queries for you. Take the queries and encapsulate them in a Perl module and forget about them once they are working the way you want them to. </p> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-72516"> <hr> <font size="-2"> Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional<br> Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg<br> </font> </div></div> 928819 928819