I've asked this question before and I got a few answers/idea, but I'm not sure how to implement them.

I'm building a telecom messaging solution. Currently, I'm using a database to save my transaction/messages for the network stack I've built, and as you know it's slower than using a data structure (hash, linkedlist, etc...). My problem is that the data can be really huge, and it won't fit in the memory.

I was thinking of saving the records in a file and the a key and line number in a hash, then if I want to access some record then I can get the line number from the hash, and get it from the file. I don't know how efficient is this; I think the database is doing a way better job than this on my behalf.

Please share whatever you have in mind.