Well, I may have been foolhardy. Based on various comments on this list I did not think I would have any trouble importing a 60,000 record database into Zope and ZCataloging it. Having the records in Zope as objects made a lot more sense for this project than putting them into a backend RDBMS. The first problem I ran into was during the import. I wrote an external method that read the data from a tab delimited file and used the data to build ZClass instances. I tried to create them all in one folder in one transaction. This failed miserably at somewhere around 1500 records. I got an error about an 'frexp' call being out of range, somewhere in ZCatalog's BTree methods (my apologies for not having captured the exact error; maybe I can reproduce it once I've finished building my new test system). So I tried loading the records in batches, and at first that seemed to work. Then I got an out of memory error. After noticing that trying to view that directory in the management interface threw both my browser and Zope into fits, I decided to try loading the records into multiple folders. This also seemed to work. I used 1000 record batches. But occasionally I would get the frexp error. If I tried the load several times, it would eventually complete without error. Loading other batches in between tries seemed to help, but that may be an illusion. My load method ended up with the occasional short file, and I got this frexp error with batches as short as 300 records. So I think the error has something to do with the catalog machinery and not the batch size. So I finally got the database loaded, and everything seemed to be working. However, we have just discovered that certain keywords do not appear to be yeilding the expected results on searches. The ZClass is catalog aware, and there are a few fields being indexed. The one of concern is just called 'keywords'. Despite its name it is a text index, so that we can take advantage of the ability to do 'AND'ed searches. One more piece of info that may or may not be important. There are actually two ZClasses: the one holding the database records, and another class with a property of the same name (keywords). Instances of this second class get added by hand. Now we find that when we enter certain keywords (the examples we have found so far are 'well' and 'fire', which you probably don't need to know) on one of these by-hand ZClass instences, they are *not* found by a ZCatalog search on the keywords field index. Other words entered into the keywords field do cause the record to be found ('wells', for example). Now, I'm guessing no one is going to have an answer for me. What I'm hoping for is some tips for how to go about debugging this. Actually, what I'm really hoping is that someone from DC will view this as an important enough bug that they'll ask for a login on my system to check it out through <grin>. I have a gut level feeling that the frexp error and the index failure are related, so I also may try a total reload of the database, if someone can answer question (2) below. To sumarize, this experience has raised several questions in my mind: 1) what is the practical limit on the number of entries in a folder, and is there some way to get around this for instances where you want to use the ZODB as a database for a large number of records? 2) is there a practical limit on the number of changes that can be part of a transaction (eg: *should* I be able to add 60K objects in one transaction?) 3) what is the best way to do a massive data load? 4) how does one go about debugging ZCatalog? (I've read the debugger doc posted here, and I'll see if that is enough to allow me to get started on this) --RDM