Hi Tarry,

Can't tell you how the whole DB world looked. My little corner of it was flat file DB, using IBM's ISAM - I guess IOT is the nearest that Oracle has to that. I then spent many years with a network DB - hashed keys for direct access and chained records for the rest . . . (In those days table=file, row=record and column=field - it took me ages to change my vocabulary - I still slip occasionally) . . . . and we used Syncsort for FTS - fantatsic performance, if your files were aligned on cylinder boundaries!