At the suggestion of Academic Computing, the tables that would comprise each user's profile will be stored in an Oracle database and read from/written to through the interface DBI provides. Another reason this approach has been suggested is Oracle's robustness in handling simultaneous access to such a database. While Perl offers flock (file locking) it isn't as robust.

05.27.00: An Oracle database in the naudev space has been allocated.

On another, coincidental front, I am also familiarizing myself with Corel Paradox, which is also an RDBMS and hopefully will lessen my learning curve in these matters. This is being done to collect demographic stats on Cline's site pages.

05.31.00: most of the day spent trying to understand complex SQL queries (i.e., how to most efficiently make multiple queries of the monthly stats and collate their results into one report).
06.01.00: Apparently there isn't an efficient way of collecting these stats short of running individual queries. Once Heather sends me the IP numbers for discerning geographical regions I can put the queries together and create a pseudoreport on a spreadsheet.
06.06.00: Currently studying tutorials on DBI, which are few and far between (the module's authors have opted instead to publish an animal-cracker book). Rudimentary CGI built that successfully interfaces with Oracle test database of "education" links, using DBI:Oracle.