Hi, about the country images may be stored as a sprite image, link:
Flag Sprites[
^] and then use css to determine which flag should be loaded...you can find many examples of this.
I'm not familiar with RAD controls but loading 50K records in any type of grid will always lead to performance issues. You should page the data to load ex 10 or 100 records at a time. Also probably RAD grid offers filtering and sorting features where these work good with paging.
The user will find searching through 50K records a challenging task and most often the majority of the time only a few records will be used. Think of search engines...you never get to see the million records matched because probably you only need to look at top 10 to find your answers.