document updated 16 years ago, on Mar 27, 2008
Perl's Storable + dbm (synthesized as MLDBM) is incredibly flexible in that schema changes are trivial, and it allows heterogeneous data to be stored. (it's limited, however, in that it only indexes on one key... you can create additional indexes by creating a new DBM that points to the real data in the first DBM, but each index you tack on ends up requiring increasing amounts of manual synchronization, which is painful)
It's definitely not suited for every task. But sometimes it's just right. Analogous things exist in other languages:
See also