Hi Tracy: Look at the -v switch on formatdb. The -v switch breaks the database into volumes and preserves the complete database size (so you do not have to recalculate the size-dependent quantities upon completion). For exanple, to split a recent nr into several volumes of at most 100M letters formatdb -v 100000000 -p T -o T -i nr yields [root@frontend-0 db2]# ls -alF total 1507984 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 20 22:53 ./ drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Jan 20 22:43 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 405 Jan 20 22:53 formatdb.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 589765675 Jan 20 22:44 nr -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 190609908 Jan 20 22:49 nr.00.phr -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6949984 Jan 20 22:51 nr.00.pin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12565120 Jan 20 22:49 nr.00.pnd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 49132 Jan 20 22:49 nr.00.pni -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 173748036 Jan 20 22:50 nr.00.psd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3804603 Jan 20 22:51 nr.00.psi -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 277315926 Jan 20 22:49 nr.00.psq -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 82065838 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.phr -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2997568 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.pin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5409488 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.pnd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21180 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.pni -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 74213127 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.psd -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1658969 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.psi -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 119641224 Jan 20 22:53 nr.01.psq -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 106 Jan 20 22:53 nr.pal To run the code, simply use the normal methods. Use nr as the database (-d nr) Joe -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Scalable Informatics LLC, email: landman@scalableinformatics.com web : http://scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 612 4615