Ah, I didn't know about Class::XPath. Looks very nice, and almost exactly what the doctor ordered.

As far as I can see, Data::Diver doesn't allow the more general kind of querying which the OP requested.

And whilst LDAP has a special place in my heart, as far as I know, it has the same schema issues which SQL does. LDAP object classes need to be defined in terms of mandatory and optional attributes, the attributes need to have an appropriate syntax. Basically LDAP object class == SQL table, LDAP attribute == SQL column. The main differences IMHO are that LDAP gives you a heirarchically-defined name for each entry and SQL gives you a richer query language.

I would agree that DBs aren't the answer to everything, but they are an answer to "how do I do fairly arbitrary queries to my structuted data".