I am no pro C programmer, so I guess the root of my initial question was, if you are filling an array for instance, with all the Item data... you can start at [0] and to to the highest # [58000] for example. If you are missing item ids between those two numbers, the array for the missing value is still allocated, no? Thus taking up memory? See, I am not sure if C++ is just smarter than me. Maybe if a few records (or 100,000!!) are skipped over to accomodate this custom numbering idea, the array doesn't allocate that ram. Or, I just have no idea what I am talking about (it's been almost 20 years since I have done actual programming that wasn't ASP/PHP - forgive my noobness).
Anyway, if I fill an array in PHP, it definitely allocates the empty spot - because when I iterate back through it, anything missing is NULL. Hmm. Maybe there's my answer.
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