>>>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.
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>>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.
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>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 .
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>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).

Ditto here... The bottleneck which crapped out on the video files was storing the filetostr() into a vairable. Doing a copy memo / append memo did the trick.