Squishing data

[Shari]

I am trying to figure out the best way to take a lot of data, and 
store it in a way that takes up the least amount of space, but still 
be able to access it ** quickly **.

The raw data is in 300 fields.  Each field has a different amount of 
data, several hundred lines of data each.  I need to be able to call 
the data up in increments of 1 to 300, regardless of how it is 
stored.  And the lines of data represent specific things.  Line 1 to 
100 are for somethingA, and 101 to 150 for somethingB, and when you 
get to the end, line 800 + are for the last something, which has no 
limit as far as the number of lines it could be.

The stack with 300 fields is about 15 MB.  I tried putting the data 
into an array, and deleting the fields.  But it actually makes the 
stack bigger to do this.  I created an array with 300 elements, 
myArray[1] held the data from field 1, and so forth.

I'd like to get this thing down to about 4-5 MB if possible.

Is there a way?  SMALL and FAST are the keywords for this.

(This stack holds no sounds or images, it is 100% data storage.  A 
lot of the 15 MB is for a very large array that already exists, and 
needs to remain.  Unfortunately there was no faster way to access 
that part of the data, and speed was critical.)

Shari
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