Plankton, although I don't have experience with SDBM_file
after inspecting your code ( and POD ) I'll make a
suggestion:
The SDBM_file works by having a key and a value stored
in a hash - and on file. In insert() you are basically
overwriting the keys REQ,INQFILE etc. with keys that
have the same names but diff values.
I suggest that you do this: $h{uniqval} = $req.
That way your whole reference is the value and
you will have some key which represents it.
The main thing is that your reference should only be the value

Now, the unique hash key concept is completely overkill
and in this case you just need a tied array. I don't
know of any modules that do this ( maybe storable/dumper)
but perhaps $hash{mainkey} = \@array-of-references will work...
I hope I helped!

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