it seems as though ...

Back-of-a-napkin benchmarks are, well, worth about the same as a used napkin. I would suggest grabbing MySQL or PostgreSQL and trying it out. An RDBMS would certainly be the solution I would choose, given what you have described of the problem. (Not to mention that, at best, you're looking at needing 16 x 600M = 6.4B bytes, or 6.4gigabytes, even without any overhead.)

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested

In reply to Re: Maintaining uniqueness across millions of items by dragonchild
in thread Maintaining uniqueness across millions of items by sdbarker

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