> I would not assume everyone has sqlite but this can be done optionally with a plugin. Will consider writing a demo for this.

Used to be everyone used BerkleyDB or some similar key-value store - for a great many usecases SQLite is just pragmatically better.

And it's arguably less exotic than perl.

You should of course do what want - but "just use SQLite" is pretty solid advice when dealing with structured data - and almost certainly better than "smart" text file.