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in reply to Re: store/retrieve data structure in MySQL
in thread store/retrieve data structure in MySQL

Note, it can be a bad idea to do this, instead of having a proper db design.

I have seen a coworker just use Data::Dumper to store text repsentations of objects. He then ends up using Regexp queries to search within db fields for object attributes. So he is storing more information than required and losing many rdbms features.

Tying your data to your dev language is obviously not a great idea for portability either. Anyway you dump it ,then you eval it as pseudo below. You will probably have to use a string rather than binary representation if you wish to search the data easily. As you are using a blob field you will have to use storable instead.

#get string representation for insert into db my $data={}; use Data::Dumper; my $serial=Dumper($data); #get object back from string my $obj=eval $serial;