# I've never really used a dbm.
# They allow complicated structures, right?
$dbm{$name}{'age'} = 29;

Well, some do, and some dont... MLDBM certainly does, though your syntax wont work. Quoting from the pod:

Adding or altering substructures to a hash value is not entirely transparent in current perl. If you want o store a reference or modify an existing reference value in the DBM, it must first be retrieved and stored in a temporary variable for further modifications. In particular, something like this will NOT work properly:

$mldb{key}{subkey}[3] = 'stuff';        # won't work
[download]

Instead, that must be written as:

$tmp = $mldb{key};                      # retrieve value
$tmp->{subkey}[3] = 'stuff';
$mldb{key} = $tmp;                      # store value
[download]

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This limitation exists because the perl TIEHASH interface currently has no support for multidimensional ties.

-Blake