--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Milan Babuskov <milanb@...>
wrote:

> It won't work. Won't be able to declare the external table.
> You should really try and compare the speed you would gain from

external

> table to the time it takes to pad the file.

Thanks for letting me know that. I suspect I would have wasted hours
trying to get it to work with a non-fixed width file. I'm writing a
small Lazarus/Free Pascal program that will pad it. I can shell to
this in PHP which should run super fast. Once that is done, I'll
connect to it as an EXTERNAL table and then just bring in the data
using an INSERT statement.

Thanks to everyone for input on this. I'll post back the speed
results of doing it this way for anyone interested.

Myles