I saw 10 replies to your queastion and was tempted not to weigh in on this one. But having read them, well I just cannot help myself!

Firstly, by moving to a DBD/DBI driven framework your application will not only become moreportable across differing platforms, but also between solutions on a single platform.

I have Perl 5.6/5.8 scripts (some are complete GUI programmes!) that can move from MS-Access on Win32, MS-SQL server, and MySQL on Win32. Then I can run the same thing on Linux with PostGres or MySQL (I prefer the latter).

Even though you dont 'need' MySQL or something similar, it wont do you any harm either!

As someone else said, you have chosen a partable programming platform, now you should choose a portable database solution. I develop on WindowsXP using ActiveState 5.8.0 with MySQL installed on the same machine for both GUI applications and CGI scripts. My GUI apps end up running 75% on Windows and 25% Linux, the CGI is almost universally running under Apache on Linux. It is a framework that has worked very well for me.

Currently I am working on a 'small' GUI product, It is around 1000 lines of code in Perl, with about 2 million records in a MySQL database. Works like a charm on a simple entry level Celeron machine we use for testing. In fact it runs very well on a Pentium III machine which is about 6 years old too!

Good luck! jdtoronto