RE: Comparing fields in 2 large files

Hi Craig

Please keep your responses to the perl.beginners group so that others
can both
provide input as well as learn from your experience. Thanks.

I suggest you stick with Perl but process the data directly from the
database.
Take a look at the DBI module, which isn't a standard one and so may
need to be
installed. Using that you can write SQL from within a Perl program, and
I'm sure
it will be a lot swifter that way.

Even so, it looks to me as if what you need can be written in a single
SELECT
statement, in which case a Perl wrapper is simply an unnecessary
overhead.
Without knowing the full details of the problem it's hard to tell.

Cheers,

Rob

=======================

Sorry about that I did mean to respond to the whole group.

I think I may be overlooking something based on your comment about
'single SELECT statement'.   Let me show you visual example.   My real
data as I mentioned is millions of records of sales data totally
unrelated to example :-).

Table_A (next line column headings)
Animal	Color		PetStoreID
dog		black		777
cat		white		888
dog		brown		999

Table_B (next line column headings)
Comment				PetStoreID
I sold the white cat		111
cat black ran away		111
br_own is the dog color		222
do-gbla-ck is sick		222

I would need an SQL to do something similar to the following.  I know
how to hard code a value for like, but don't know of a way to do a like
comparing an actual field name.  I don't have the cleanup portion of the
Comment column as I can do that relatively easily in a prior step.   My
output would be a merge of data from table_a and table_b.

WHERE table_b.comment LIKE table_a.animal
AND table_b.comment LIKE table_a.color
AND table_b.PetStoreID <> table_a.PetStoreID

Thanks again for the help.

Craig