use Perl

As a way to learn more about the various XML technologies, I am working on a project to provide XML versions of various D&D and D20 rules and expansions (new spells, feats, classes...).

My concern has been efficiently storing, searching and recalling such XML files. I haven't come across a suitable tool (Open Source and Free as in Beer) to do this. So I started writing a module that takes an arbitrary XML file, parses it and stuffs it into a database. Once in the database I can use the more familiar SQL for searches.

Now as cool as I think this module could be... I'm not sure it's the right thing to do. But I don't know the toolsets available well enough to find a better method. I'm pretty convinced that a straight flat file format is going to break under the load because of the size (1000's of Feats and Spells, 100's of classes) and the fact that it is a growing dataset

I'm planning to use AxKit to actually serve the data, but how do I store it? Any insights would be invaluable.

Thanks for your time!

I'm a total addict of reading the journals here at use.perl. But coming to the site, and opening 20 windows to read the latest journal entries does get a bit boring (not to mention hard on the system). What I'd love to be able to do is to subscribe to 1 RSS channel that would list all of the recent journal entries. But even though I'm a pretty smart guy, I can't figure out how to do that. What's worse, I think the existing feed might work, except that I don't know how to add people to my friends list.

Any suggestions?

I'm looking for recommendations for good programming books covering GUI/windows/event programming. All of my programming experience is script and web based, and I have almost no clue on how to go about creating a windowing based application. I'd prefer a language nuetral approach, but am capable of following just about any language.