>>That's the limit on string value in a variable (perhaps not even there, but many string functions may chop it) but not on a memo field. You can still do strtofile() and filetostr() straight with a memo field. I saw it work for a few hundred megabytes.
>
>I think someone did point out that StrToFile()/FileToStr() can handle larger strings - in this case, the string has to be run through STRCONV() because of encoding and STREXTRACT() to pull out data between tags so from what I can tell, we are bumping up against 16MB limits once we get to those other functions. Mind you, if I rewrote the entire app myself to do a away with it going through this document app, maybe I would not need any of that.

I recently imported a bunch of documents into SQL Server 2012. For some operations large strings can be used as pointed out in Rick Strahl's blog: https://west-wind.com/wconnect/weblog/ShowEntry.blog?id=882 .

My import was about 70,000 documents totaling about 50GB. The process worked with documents up to around 300MB, although I wasn't doing anything like encoding/decoding. ISTR one file that was about 325 - 350MB crapping out, so in the import I limited file size to 300MB and logged any files encountered that were larger than that (typically video recordings of meetings).