>>I have an app that updates insurance plans. I store some general notes about each plan in a memo field. This field usually contains 7 or 8 small sentences. My problem is that when I populate this information (one sentence at a time) for thousands of plans the memo field bloats to >330 mb. After packing the memo (and 10 minutes) it goes down to 50mb. I'm worried about users running out of disk space. Is there a way to reduce this without stopping in the middle of the routine and doing a pack memo? I update the memo fields with the following code:
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>>REPL myMemo WITH ALLT(myMemo)+CHR(13)+cNewLine IN myTable
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>>I have also used the ADDITIVE reference:
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>>REPL myMemo WITH CHR(13)+cNewLine ADDITIVE IN myTable
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>>This gives no relief to the file size issue.
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>Nope - VFP does not reuse blocks in a memo field when the field is updated, so each REPLACE is expensive - it create new blocks to write the entire field content fresh each time you update it. Why not build the memo field content before doing the REPLACE?

I will be processing between 10 and 50 files updating different parts of insurance plans. each file may or may not require the memo field for a given plan. Instead of updating the plan table directly I could create a cursor with planID n(6), memo_line c(100) and populate the cursor instead. I could then scan through this cursor and build a variable for each plan and do the REPLACE with that variable into the Plan table. Does this sound feasible?

Thanks,
Marcus.