If you were talking about production code, you might need to worry about > getting more clever with memory management... but if it's a once-and-done > processing script, I see nothing wrong with taking the associative array > approach in the interest of writing clean, understandable code. I think the > easiest solution to your problem is simply to raise your PHP memory limit: > > http://www.ducea.com/2008/02/14/increase-php-memory-limit/ > > Obviously this solution only works to a certain point... but if you're > hitting a 32MB limit right now, you've probably still got a lot of room to > grow! > 32MB may just be a default configuration that wasn't even intentional, so I'd just ask for a boost. If you can't get that, creating a temp table might meet your need. I wouldn't even consider making millions of UPDATE calls. kyle