I agree with both your additions and corrections, but have one addition to one of your friends correction.

He or she is absolutely right in saying that you should not increase memory beyond the ability of the processor (and the bios) to address directly.

But if you are managing 1.5 million record tables you need to make sure your processor, motherboard can address AT LEAST up to a gig of memory directly. This is even more true if the 1.5 millon record table is being placed on a shared disk.

There is also one exception to the requirement that your chip be able to address the space directly. If the file is on a shared server, and the shared server runs under Novell 4.0 or above -- Novell is designed to make optimal use of large amounts of memory -- even when that memory is not directly addressable. Although NT has long since passed Novell as an application server, Novell is still one of the best file servers around for the Wintel world.