Suitable for a PIC?

I have an old VCR with a bar code scanner on the remote (for scanning in recording times) I was thinking about starting a project that would use the scanner for reading barcodes from lots of products and have a lookup data base. I'm fairly familiar with PBP and am of only average ability with it - do you think this project would be feasible with a pic and an external memory - and average ability? - The external memory would be programmed on a serial download from a PC. I'm looking at storing thousands of products on it and am wondering if it's a suitable job for a PIC - or if I should be looking at more sophisticated technology?? The only reason I thought it might be problematic with a PIC is the sheer volume of data I want it to lookup from - is that solely dependent on the size of the external ram - will the pic be able to deal with large external memories of maybe 100MB?

It's 'relatively' easy to hook a PIC into a large external flash card, be it a hard drive, CompactFlash, SecureDigital, (insert type here), card. For one example, www.sparkfun.com, search for the DOSonChip.
If I can do a PIC based MP3 player capable of running an 80GB laptop drive (along with a CF card used as a buffer) with about 12,000 mp3's on it with my own SLFS (silly little file system), you can surely do what you're talking about.
I suppose the problem would be in figuring out a decent method of indexing all of the data. Also, once you get a load of information loaded, I would think it might be a bit of a slow process of searching thru all that data with a PIC.