beautiful! Thank you everyone for the very thoughtful answers. I think I'm over my head here, but the first step is going to be to reduce the 8 million lines to what we're guessing is 400,000 unique sets of characteristics, then go from there. This is easy enough, but the 400,000 unique sets will then all have to be compared to each other.

Then I'll work through these methods of converting the data to bit strings to simplify the comparisons.

Thank you thank you!

In reply to Re^2: Huge data file and looping best practices by carillonator
in thread Huge data file and looping best practices by carillonator

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