Paul,

Thanks for responding.

>> It doesn't quite say that the max db file size is 4GB under NTFS.

I emailed Helen about this, because at least to me, it's a bit
confusing. P. 946 says that the max *db* size is theoretically 7TB.
I take this to mean, truly, the max size, assuming the hardware/OS
platform supports it. But then she says the max *file* size is
"Depends on the file system...Older NTFS and ext3 are usually 4GB."
It sounds to me like I *can* have a 16G .FDB file under WinXP/NTFS.

>> NTFS itself allows files up to 2TB, although not all MS O/S
> will support files that large.

I assume that's true as my 16.6G text file *does* exist :)

I'll try breaking up the text file into 1G chunks and see how that
goes. At this size, I'm looking at ~1M recs/files, which is quite a
bit more than Helen's recommended 10k recs/transaction.

Hmm...any way to turn off transaction processing, like SELECT..NO
TRANSACTION?