When I say "considering", I mean "chosen". We have found FB to be
excellent for developing with. Excellent all round, in fact.

However, our application will be used with largish data volumes
(probably upto 50GB), and its nature means that the faster we can
load, the happier our customers will be. Anything we can do to
improve this is a good thing.

We are using external files in some areas, and they do perform better
than anything else we have tried. Our dbms structures are dynamically
created, so I don't think that ESQL programs for loading would help
us.

We can certainly chop up files into 2GB chunks.

A "straightforward", high speed bulk loader for delimited and fixed
length files would be very useful in some circumstances. I think (and
I could be wrong:-)) that external files can be offputting to
relatively inexperienced FB users/reviewers that are used to
facilities such as SQL server/DB2 etc. bulk loaders. After all,
loading data is one of the first things many people do when trying
something out. However, Rome wasn't built in a day! FB is a great
piece of work.

Cheers
Chris

--- In ib-support@yahoogroups.com, "Leyne, Sean" <sleyne@a...> wrote:
> Chris,
>
> > We are considering Windows, Linux and Solaris as server
platforms,
> > regarding FB1.03.
> >
> > What is the maximum size of an external file.
>
> To date the engine code has *not* been reviewed to enable 64bit I/O
> operations for external files (even under v1.5).
>
> For safety sake, consider the limit to be 2GB. The file pointer in
the
> code is a int (I'm not sure whether it's signed or unsigned).
>
> BTW, why are you 'concerned' about the file limits for external
files?
> (not many people get close to the limit)
>
>
> --
> Sean Leyne
>
> - FirebirdSQL Foundation, Sponsor - Silver Level
> - FirebirdSQL Foundation, Member
> - FirebirdSQL Project Admin (one of many)
> http://www.FirebirdSQL.org