Thanks Alex for your comments.

It is very interesting the fact that you are dealing with an Informix database with over 200 mill records, now is there an easy way to extends the table size on an Informix DB without having to unload - reload the data in it?
Reason I spoke with the vendor of the product of this billing system and they told me that for them to increase the extents of the table it will take them about from 3-4 days process.. isn't there a way to do this on an Informix DB with out having to shut it down?
by the way what are the specs of the system you are working on? just to have an idea on perhpas rebuilding this system

tx


>In a previous hjob, some years ago, I did a whole telephone billing system in FP2.6 that read directly (RS-232) from a Harris switch every 30 seconds into DBFs. Then we did stats, billing, and once a month the printing of the bills (that took all night), everything from FPD. VFP did not exist at the time but FPD was great for this task.
>
>Today I deal with severals databases, from VFP. In one app, I do queries from a Sun running Informix (read-only) table of 200 million records with VFP6.0
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>>I have some questions on regards of Informix and FoxPro.
>>Currently I am in an evaluation-project for a midsize telecom company, and
>>they have this SCO-Unix based Informix database, which at the present stage on
>>one of its main table contains close to 40million rows , extracting this data is kind of a pain in the behind , since they have an "Access" billing-reconciliation system.. arghhh!!.
>>
>>Extracting the monthly data is a pain since the files are over 1/2 gig in size and I have to export them into tables on Access.
>>I have begun some minor process on Foxpro to help me on the daily data process, but still I have to manage with the "Access" thing.
>>
>>Questions:
>>1)There must be a better way to do this, and if you have experience this in
>>the past, I would like to enquire in some alternatives in how to automate the process of extracting data.
>>
>>2)For Telecoms, I have worked with SQL server backends for their billing systems , Do you guys know of any other systems that runs in Oracle?
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