Got RAM?

C:\>perl -e "foreach (1..40_000){push @foo, {}}; print scalar @foo"
40000
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If you've got enough RAM, I don't see why not. You may want to look at some sort of tied, disk resident data structure, it will be slower but might not eat all your RAM. Since I still haven't mastered tie, someone smarter that I shall have to go into more detail, but I bet you could tie an array to a DBM file and just use your array index for the keys.

TGI says moo