Jos,

I really think John's situation is far from the norm. I don't think it's worth the hassle of padding/depadding the data. If your memos undergo small additions over time you can more efficiently use a large blocksize like 16k. If you have a 5mb memo and it grows by 1k each time it gets updated then you on averageg the memo be able to fit in the same allocation 8 times, then right after it overlows you'll get 15 replaces before it goes to a new allocation.

Include a PACK MEMO maintenance item in your menu so the the users can slim down their memo files when they get out of hand.

>Hi David. pmfji - I have a file which does not get updated often, has only a few hundred records, but does contain a memo field which can hold a large amount of text, +/-5Mb. Just to be clear, are you saying that it might be beneficial to pad my text with chr(0) out to some maximum possible size and then to ensure that each replace always pads out to the same size? i.e. ensure that each memo field is always, for example, 6Mb in my case?