Hi monks

For the application I'm contributing to, we need to use tied hashes because of the big memory requirements. Due to filesize limitations and probably more important problems with concurent acces for updating data I plan to use binding to SQL database instead to a DBM file.

The Tie::RDBM module looks like a probably good solution for only minimal changes need to be done in the existing application code and there is support for nested data structures. The main problem here is the unicode support in keys/values and table size limitations.

The first on my mind was MySQL, but... The created table reports that it's maximum size can be only 4GB. After some tests done It seems to me that I can't use unicode in keys/values directly and I must use decode('utf8', $_) to all values I've get from to obtain unicode string. When using BerkeleyDB there are filters which can be used for that, but what should one use here?

Which database management system should I use? Is there some system which is able to fit my requirements - large tables and native unicode support? I'm using Linux on 32-bit machine.

Any suggestions or comments are welcome.