>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?
>

If the spaces are useless, then you can

* write
replace with PAD(,6M)

* read
? RTRIM(MEMO)

But only in exclusive mode and without buffering, this avoids the bloat.