James Edward Gray II wrote:

> To me is would be handy if each object could be stored in its own data 
> file, or if I could control the serialization file scheme (not sure 
> quite how).  This especially works if it uses something like YAML, so 
> I can tweak it a little externally, but still be able to treat it as 
> my DB inside of Ruby.  Would probably be cool if I could choose my 
> output format too:  YAML, XML, or whatever. 

See YAML::DBM, which comes with Ruby.

  require 'yaml/dbm'
  YAML::DBM.open( "/tmp/blog" ) do |db|
     db['name'] = 'RedHanded'
     db['url'] = 'http://redhanded.hobix.com'
     db['contact'] = ['redhanded / hobix.com', 'why / whytheluckystiff.net']
  end

  YAML::DBM.open( "/tmp/blog" ) do |db|
     p db['contact']
  end
  #=> ['redhanded / hobix.com', 'why / whytheluckystiff.net']

However, it's a layer on top of DBM, so it doesn't meet Hal's requirements.

_why