>We have run into the 2 Gig file limit. While there are workarounds possible by splitting files, we are going to take the approach of simply upgrading our backend to a database server.
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>Our normal back-end is SQl Server (though we use Oracle for a few applications).
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>We have used VFP as the back end for batch jobs, run against exclusivly opened files. VFP is the fastest thing out there for this kind of thing. (If I'm wrong I would be very interested in hearing what works faster.)
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>I'm thinking that for this sort of thing SQL Server may not be the best back end. Anyone having any thoughts as to what SQL back end will give us the best performance for huge, string intensive, batch adds and updates where we can get exclusive use of the database, and sometimes even of the server?

Sounds like you´re looking at DB2. I seem to remember that you can turn all sorts of things (like transaction logging) on and off.
That way you should gain a lot of performance.
The pricetag is steep, though!