file too large

[Mike Schwartz]

> I just don't remember how to use the extents, since I never personally
> needed them.  Surely many here know, though, and can provide the details.
> 
> mark->

     Historical perspective:

     Back in the days when we were running Profile on 55k floppy disk drives
(yes, that's kilobytes, not megabytes) you could put the first (key) segment
on the first floppy drive, along with the operating system and the Profile
program, itself.  Then you could use the 3 extents on floppy drive 2, 3 and
4 to add additional fields.  That way you could store something like a
whopping 180K of data in your filepro file.
 
     The first segment was named the "key" segment because if you wanted to
build an index, the field you were indexing on had to be in this first "key"
segment.  You couldn't build an index on any of the fields that were on the
other 3 floppy disks.

     I was still breaking files into extents when we got our Model II and
Model 16, even with their larger floppy disk drives.  I was even breaking
some files into extents when we got our first 8 Meg and 15 Meg hard drives.
In the back of my mind I can still hear the chirping sound of those four 8
Meg hard drives chirping away like birds when we were running our morning
reports at American Can.

   When we moved over to an IBM 286 computer that had dual 40 Meg drives, I
mostly quit breaking files into extents.  Occasionally I did break files for
performance issues, but never for hard disk issues.  When a file gets too
large, it's usually time to "normalize" it, which means breaking it into
header/detail files or somehow breaking the data apart.   

Mike Schwartz