Sorry about that. I work with large text and am working on implementing suffix arrays in Perl. This is why I need to store so much data. The entire text needs to be stored in memory. I have tried the database approach using BerkeleyDB and DB_File both are very nice but kill me on IO. It simply takes to much time (weeks). I can convert the strings to integers and then store them in a vec. This seems to be working okay so far but I was curious if anyone had a better solution. Thanks for the quick responses, I didn't expect to get so many this morning!!