Using bsddb with Berkeley DB 3.3

[Iddo]

Hi,

I am using the Python2.2 bsddb interface with a BerkeleyDB 3.3.11, on
Linux RH7.3
As I was unaware that there are more updated packages not in the
standard python distribution (just found out), I have written quite a
bit of code using bsddb.I am pretty much the newbie to this aspect of
Python (basically, I needed some good serialization, I do not know
much about the Berkeley DB).

1) Is this really bad? If so, is there an easy way to "upgrade".

2) My databases seem to be terribly large. For example, I converted a
2.6GB hashdb (created with Python too) to BTree, and it blew up to
~10GB. Is it the old interface? Something else? Where to I start
checking?

Thanks, any additional info given would be appreciated.

Iddo