I suppose there are many reasons why you could have 100mil records in a flat file, as a sysadmin some that come to mind are log files for busy web servers, name servers, terse logging for samba. Also there are programs in the wild (beleave it or not) that we don't have the source for that have hardcoded outputs. =) oo oo and those pesky 10 year old propriatary mainframe apps with there gooffy output. /me wishes he could wave his magic wand have all of this data magically be in relational DBs -- ACK! but then what would we really need a Practical Extraction and Report Language for? =)

-Waswas