Storable or Sereal was the 1st thing that came to my mind but then I realised that they do not allow for searching individual fields (e.g. select) while in-store. You have to read them back into memory and do that there. Additionally, when you want to insert a new record with references or referred by already existing record you need to read all back in memory, add the record, and store. So, (as Choroba said on CB:) "it's hard to make guesses without a detailed spec or use cases." I will add that each solution comes at a price.

OTOH I completely understand your "frustration" that there is no simpler way than creating tables especially to represent complex and nested data structures. But perhaps NoSQL is what you are looking for, see MongoDB::Tutorial. And there are all sort of modules which abstract the tedious parts of SQL away. e.g. DBIx::Class and SQL::Abstract - I am just mentioning those as further reading. I am no way near an expert for these. Other Monks are.

bw, bliako