Hi, This is on CentOS-5/x86_64 running : [kbsingh@koala data]$ rpm -qa | grep -i Monet MonetDB-1.22.0-1.el5.kb.oid64 MonetDB5-server-5.4.0-1.el5.kb.oid64 MonetDB-SQL-2.22.0-1.el5.kb.oid64 MonetDB-client-1.22.0-1.el5.kb.oid64 MonetDB-SQL-server5-2.22.0-1.el5.kb.oid64 server started with : [root@koala ~]# mserver5 --dbinit="include sql;" on the client : [kbsingh@koala data]$ echo "\d sample" | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb CREATE TABLE "kb"."sample" ( "id" char(33), "sdate" char(20), "key" varchar(255), "country" char(2), "region" char(2), "city" varchar(50), "pid" int ); [kbsingh@koala data]$ echo "select 'hello';" | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb % . # table_name % single_value # name % char # type % 5 # length [ "hello" ] [kbsingh@koala data]$ echo "copy 1000 records into sample from '/home/kbsingh/data/data/1000.utf8' using delimiters '\t','\n','';" | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb [ 1000 ] also: [kbsingh@koala data]$ mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb -s "copy 1000 records into sample from '/home/kbsingh/data/data/1000.utf8' using delimiters '\t','\n','';" [ 1000 ] so, works so far. However: [kbsingh@koala data]$ cat 1000.utf8 | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb -s "copy 1000 records into sample from STDIN using delimiters '\t','\n','';" MAPI = kb@localhost:50000 QUERY = copy 1000 records into sample from STDIN using delimiters '\t','\n',''; ERROR = !SQLException:sql:missing sep line 0 field 0 !SQLException:importTable:failed to import table given that mclient is on the right side of the pipe, the data is surely being made available on the stdin, but why does mclient fail like this ? also, adding an OFFSET makes mclient just die quietly like this: [kbsingh@koala data]$ cat 1000.utf8 | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb -s "copy 5 offset 1000 records into sample from STDIN using delimiters '\t','\n','';" [kbsingh@koala data]$ so, what am I getting so wrong here ? the load chain I need to setup will look like this : zcat andy1.gz | iconv -f latin1 -t utf8 | mclient ...... that compressed file is 62 GB, the changes of me being able to expand that run the load from a specific filename is zero. -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219@icq