If you can use sqlplus to do the job, I found that spool is faster than utl_file. Or you can use perl's print , it is faster than utl_file. But if you have to use utl_file, instead of writing out each short line, you can concate the string to make it long enough, then write it out once (the limit is something like 32K). HTH. Guang -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John Dunn Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 11:04 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Faster option than utl_file I find utl_file too slow for reading and writing large text files. In fact it seems faster to read/write files from a Windows Visual Basic client application over NFS then to read/write using utl_file on the server. Is there a faster alternative? Or any way to tune utl_file? Platform is Oracle 9i on AIX 5. John -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l