>>>I have to create a table of 35 millions plus records. The table is to be populated from 850 fixed length text files. I get about 1/3rd of the way through with the imports and I hit the 2 Gig limit for Visual FoxPro tables.
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>>>I took the 2 Gig dbf file and exported it to a delimited text file to see how much smaller it might be since there are a lot of empty fields in the table. To my surprise the 2,079,274 KB table made a 2,066,947 KB delimited text file.
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>>Did you use SDF or CSV? I'm finding CSV to be smaller because it removes the spaces (though not for numbers). I dont' think it's going to help really solve the problem though.
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>Nancy,
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>I had done a COPY TO ... DELIMITED. I was suprised that I didn't get a larger drop in file size. I opened the resulting txt file just to make sure that it wasn't a fixed length file accidently but it was a delimited file without the spaces. Even had that worked and reduced the file size down to something managable, I would still have had the problem of how to work with a text file doing complicated searches that I would normally do in VFP using indexes and and RUSHMORE.

Apparently it's not entirely clear then exactly what your question is. Do you want to know how to compress 2 gigs down to 650, and have it still be accessible as a Fox backend?

When the application was designed was the requirment that it fit on a CD known? Was it then evaluated as to what the data size would be and then backend tools evaluated?