Personally, the only reason[1] I can see for storing config information in a file rather than an RDBMS (assuming the script uses an RDBMS anyway) is the issue of human readability. And for that you can use DBD::CSV or DBD::AnyData (which supports XML, Ini, and other human readable formats) which will allow the data to be human readable *and* accessible with selectall_hashref(). If you don't need it to be human readable/editable, just stick with your current RDBMS. My $0.02.

update [1] : well, obviously my imagination is somewhat limited this morning. What tilly said.