>>I think bypassing the memo fields is going to be the way, do the read fill in the table with the important fields along with numeric byte locations to the original data files, then do all the matching and sorting, and at the point of export back to text file read directly from the original files. it'll be the same effect as if
>>I had the memo field but with a little more code to avoid foxpro handling that part of the data.
>>
>>Thanks for the suggestions, if I do find a good way around this I'll report back.
>
>Pumping out differently is the thing I want to try - as the dump to text is fast enough that can be a fallback.

I used a technique like that once - to sort records that couldn't be indexed or sorted otherwise because there wasn't room on the disk :). So I had a narrower version of the table (but covering the whole year) as a simple sequential but sorted, i.e. a textfile, and then had an indexed table with just keys and offsets into the first record of any item in that textfile. The reports which were coming out of that were blazingly fast.

That was in VAX Cobol and VAX Basic, winter '87-88 :).