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>I've got mysql server running on the processing machine, but using that to store the data would mean rewriting the sorting and matching part of the program, which is a lot of code and is currently fast, getting the data from memory back onto disk as a foxpro table is the bit that is slow. once I've got that bit done it sorts and matches in seconds and then writes out to a pipe delimited file in seconds.

Using MySQL (or SQL Express which would be faster) as the datastore eliminates almost all the IO. Basically a stored procedure would just spit the text back to you to save. You definitely would have to convert the processing code. It depends on how hard the code conversion would be I guess.