Christof,

>to a certain degree you can control it with SET BLOCKSIZE. Also you can prevent memo bloat by only writing a complete memo field at once. Every time you add something to a memo field, a copy of it is created.

That's not true, if the current memo contents will fit within the allocated memo space it will be put back in the same place in the .fpt file. If the memo grows beyond the allocation, new space will be allocated, and the old space wasted. Deleting records also causes the space to become wasted. There is no attempt to recover the wasted space and thus memo bloat.

Note there is a bug in VFP5 which prevents any memo reuse, every assignment of the memo field results in new space allocation, thus making bloating much worse.