Hi
This may not be the answer you were hoping for, but - have you thought
about hosting the DB on a Linux box? You can get Suse 9.1 or Fedora
Core 2 for little money and both are excellent at running Firebird ( I
have used 1 thro' 1.5 with no problems ). There are no drawbacks in
terms of accessibility or performance, and database maintenance can be
performed with any number of tools, including IBconsole. You may, of
course, be committed to a MS only site, in which case you may still
have a problem. I did think that the 4GB limit had been resolved with
XP but may be wrong.
Regards
Alan

> Fellow FB Users,
>
> I'm running FB 1.5.1 on WinXP Pro (NTFS), 1G RAM.
>
> I have a fixed-length ASCII text file that was exported from another
> DB. I need to get it into FB. The file is 16.6G is size, containing
> 17 million recs.
>
> My plan was to have FB attach the file as an external file, and then
> do a INSERT INTO..SELECT.. from the external file into a FB table.
> The process (ISQL) is failing after about 5 minutes with the following
> error message:
>
> Statement failed, SQLCODE = -902
> I/O error for file "C:\DB1\Data.txt":
> -Error while trying to open file
> -The device does not recognize the command.
>
> I have Helen's Firebird book (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!), and one of her
> appendixes (p. 946,947) states that the max DB file size under NTFS is
> 4GB. Also, the max size on a external file (NTFS) is 4GB. Helen had
> also mentioned that doing this type of import may cause a problem due
> to the number of records being read during a single transaction. She
> said to limit each transaction batch to around 10k recs.
>
> Anyway, it would appear that I have exceeded these limits. What to
> do? Break up the external file into smaller (<4GB) files? But then
> what about the final size of the FB DB - it's still going to be >4GB?
> Should I look at getting a new 64K-bit PC with 64k-bit WinXP? Change
> OS'S? Anyone else have experience doing a massive import like this?
>
> HELP!!!
>
>
>
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Alan J Davies
Tel: +44 (0)1926 842069
Fax: +44 (0)1926 843755
Mob: +44 (0)7885 372793