Hello RichardK, friends,

Sorry for answering via a shotgun message. First, again thanks for your time and help. After I posted my first reply I began playing around with http://search.cpan.org/~cleishman/Cache-2.04/ and fell in love with it. It was simple and handled the metadata caching format nicely. Collection entries could be pushed/popped as hash key=>value pairs. It also handled file locking and provided many methods to do all of the things I needed to do. Unfortunately I found out later from my boss that not only are Dbases not allowed, but any Perl Module that is not a Perl5 core module cannot be used either. Mulligan!

Regarding the heap vs files debate; I learned that the required level of persistence is actually quite high, certainly high enough to warrant the use of a Dbase if that was an option. Essentially collections will be kept indefinitely. That is the reason I chose to use files. I also found out for certain that I could not modify file names. As of now I plan on creating a pseudo-namespace for each collection by throwing collection metadata and files unique directories.

Cheers,
Hok

P.S. I used a lot of buzzwords and somehow left out "Cloud" so there I said it.