Persistent Data: my choice, and (hopefully) monks' thoughts.

[corenth]

Good day to all. This is a question about data persistence.

Context

A complex data structure, many hashes deep and many hashes wide, needs to be read from and written to. It needs to persist between program runs. I don't need to have more than a bit of it in memory at any time.

I found use MLDBM through http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/02/16/mldbm.html.

Pros: does all the above.

Cons: Need to extract a reference to work on and save it back to the file. EDIT: Con: can't edit references directly in the database file because references are no longer tied once extracted. This makes for clunkier code.

Questions

Is this good, bad, and/or ugly? Is this the state of the art? What are the different ways that monks have dealt with this kind of situation? Will I ever come to a decision? Am I forever doomed to to obsess about it? Tune in next week . . .

Thank you all. EDIT: spell check fail (persistance changed to persistence) (thank you erix)

[Anonymous Monk]

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

[corenth]

But why "Anonymous"? This is such a damned useful reply. I'm investigating DBM:: deep at the moment. Thank you.