[KLUG Members] Best way to use temp files in PHP

[members@kalamazoolinux.org]

>>internall it holds all this information in an array.  So I've got a
>>report with 15 columns of various types, and a heck of alot of rows.
>>At about ~40,000 rows I hear "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" as a
>>temporal rift occurs to some hell dimension and my PHP process topples
>>into it.  So I'm thinking I just can't have arrays that big.
>I don't suppose you can use something, such as PostgreSQL or db3,
>which is used to handling +40,000 somethings, and use PHP as a parser
>over it.  Any processing you need done on that data could also be stored
>s MySQL data and yanked out as needed.

The thought of something like db3 crossed my mind,  but I've never used it.  I
was hoping someone "out there" had.  I'm grabbing the data from a big sweaty
Informix DB.  But I can't perform the select directly into a temporary table
because of some of the nasty calculations involved.  To use a temporary table in
 the DB server would mean I'd pull data, calculate, put it back into a temp
table, request a sort, then pull the data from the temp table.  That is ALOT of
back-n-forth.  And my access to the data will be sequential so an SQL database
seems like whacking a fly with an  aircraft carrier.  There is a PostgreSQL
instance on the webserver itself used to store user preferences and some other
silly stuff,  I could use that, but it still seems like overkill (although it
would be pretty simple to code).