>>>Albert, do whatever you'd like. This mechanism is portable, does not require the passing of a binary data type, and does not require any specialized knowledge about the size of data values to process. I'm certain that you can come up with a better solution than I can - this one just happens to work and is accessible from any automation client.
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>>The issue is space, the set of values can be 512 or more (256 commonly) with 2,592,000 rows.
>
>In that case, I'd decide on a set of file formats that could be supported and pass the name of a file, the file type, and perhaps a record template - the OLE Interface overhead on a data set that size would be excessive to consider passing it line at a time IMO.

Thanks, I think there is a good argument for direct, low level I/O from C++. I just can't convince the rest of the staff ;)