maybe it would ignore control characters the same way it ignores spaces.

I did try a few control chars, but none of them worked.

I would want it to work whatever language system was used to initdb PostgreSQL. I.e., if a control char is ignored in some language system, my program won't work. :-(

I'm surprised -- half the people on Perlmonks should have been bitten by this?! I checked a lot before asking because I expected an embarrassingly obvious faq reference. (-: 1/2 Everyone use MySQL?! 1/2 :-)

Is there too much of this data to be held in memory at one time?

Oh yes. :-)

(I am really trying to store relations among persistent objects. I use the db for the persistence anyway.)

Ah well, time to port to MySQL. Thanks for help!