Thanks Peter, your answer did the trick. I programed a lot with awk (also a very cool scripting language). So I was focused on the concept a dictionary key has to be string (as in awk). Since it's impossible to use a list as a dictionary key I thought it's also impossible to use a tuple as a key. I was wrong! So my code will become more pythonic, much simpler and even faster! Your suggestion to use the database is also an idea, but the actual task is to see if some rows in (identical) tables across many servers are missing and if so to add the missing rows. In my post I showed a simplified code.
Again, thanks for the hint! Greetings Hans -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
