in reply to Simple RegEx Substring Extraction from a Delimited Text Record
($int) = $rec =~ /(INT=\d*(?=!|$))/
Or you can internalize your DB into structured data when you load it, rather than pass around such strings. Or you can consider Data::Record.
I tend to make a blessed array for the database, and fill it with objects for the records. At least at first.
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom