Re: Room Booking... any thoughts?

[BazB]

This is a very common problem - it's part of MIT's 6.916 course - they define the problem here.
MIT just happen to expect you to use Tcl (and the ArsDigita Community System) and Oracle to solve the problem, but there's no reason why you can't do this in Perl with MySQL or PostGreSQL.

Stick with using a database to store the room and reservation information - the main problem is making sure that you don't have concurrency issues.

I'd suggest you read SQL for Web Nerds over at ArsDigita (I tackled this problem at one of their bootcamps).
SQL for Web Nerds is a very interesting introduction to SQL and gives examples that are relevent to your problem, although the Oracle queries shown there might need tweaking for use with MySQL.

The final implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.