For more complicated cases, you may also want to take a look at CPAN modules dealing with JSON or Yaml data formats.

But maybe I did not understand well your requirement and you don't need data persistence. If you were only asking about which in-memory data structure to use, then you might have to give a bit more details.

There are modules to help you create and use databases. Here, see Database Programming.

Update: consider how you will retrieve your records when you need them. You may want to store your database as a Hash of Hashes (HoH). Retrieval will be very fast. See Perl Datastructures.

G'day redss,

While your example code has hard-coded values, I'll assume you're actually capturing this data from some source (user input, spreadsheet extract, etc.) and have placed the vales in $name, $addr and $city.

Create a module for your class. 'my_type' is a poor choice of name: all lowercase names are typically used for pragmata and it's totally uninformative; for want of something better, I've used 'Client::Data' below.

Take a look at "Perl OO Tutorial for Beginners". It's entry level and you may have read it previously; however, it had a major revision in 2013 (possibly more recent than your last read) and provides links to more detailed and advanced information.

The six lines of code you posted can now be reduced to:

push @client_list,
    Client::Data::->new(name => $name, address => $addr, city => $city
+);
[download]

Note that I've used an array (no dereferencing of an arrayref required) with a more informative name. A hash (perhaps %client_data_for) may be a better choice — see ++GotToBTru's comments above.

I don't know whether "access the values later" means later in the code or at a later time in other code. If the latter, ++Laurent_R has addressed this above.

Accessing the data is easy. It will, of course, depend on whether you've used an array or a hash. I've no idea how you intend to use this, but let's say you want to find Mary Smith's city. [Note: I've assumed Moose/Mouse/Moo style accessors and the example code is untested.]

my $wanted_client = 'Mary Smith';
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Array:

for my $client (@client_data) {
    if ($client->name eq $wanted_client) {
        print "${wanted_client}'s city is ", $client->city;
        last;
    }
}
[download]

Hash:

print "${wanted_client}'s city is ", $client_data_for{$wanted_client}-
+>city;
[download]

From this, it should be obvious why a hash lookup is faster. Of course, a hash may be inappropriate for your needs.

One word: DBD::SQLite

Okay, this presumes you know about DBI and SQL, but hey, you know about the monestary so you aren't clueless. :)