C# dictionary - how to solve limit on number of items?

Question

I am using Dictionary and I need to store almost 13 000 000 keys in it. Unfortunatelly, after adding 11 950 000th key I got an exception \"System out of memory\". Is there a

Answer 1

C# is not a language that was designed to solve heavy-duty scientific computation problems. It is absolutely possible to use C# to build tools that do what you want, but the off-the-shelf parts like Dictionary were designed to solve more common business problems, like mapping zip codes to cities and that sort of thing.

You're going to have to go with external storage of some sort. My recommendation would be to buy a database and use it to store your data. Then use a DataSet or some similar technology to load portions of the data into memory, manipulate them, and then pour more data from the database into the DataSet, and so on.