Tachyon, I just went back and reread your post. Brings up a quick question. I was using a long string as a key instead of {key}{key2}..., and a local perl guy told me the latter method would be better. In hopes of figuring out my problem, I changed it. You think it is better to do it the former? Only thing I could think of is that it allows the array to be stored in chunks that don't have to be contiguous as opposed to forcing the array to be all together. Any opinions on this?