Letting the datbase do the sort is a good approach, but I was hoping for a more general, memory efficient solution that allows for arbitrary perl comparison routines.

Its a common enough situation that I would like to create a subroutine that returns the rows I want and takes a database handle, a sorting coderef, M, and an optional offset. I'm envisioning something like:

my $sortedrows = db_heap_sort($dbh, $coderef, $M, $offset);
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The question is, is there a perl heap implementation that would be suitable for implementing the above sub. Heap.pm seems like the obvious choice, but I have doubts about its current status.

I have emailed the Heap.pm author, and will follow up with any new information I find out.

-Blake