UTL_FILE output file size constraint?

We know just enough to be dangerous here folks, so if we're ovelooking something obvious, please -- be gentle with us! <g>

We're in Oracle 7.3 on UNIX (AIX; Korn shell) writing PL/SQL using the UTL_FILE package to create a flat file. We can get it to work just fine with a small amount of data (a nice little literal or a few rows from a table). But, whenever we try to process more data (say 30 rows from a table and output them tab-delimited) we trigger a WRITE_ERROR and only get a few records in our output file. If we set the number of rows extracted in the exact same procedure down to something small (seems like under 3000 char max?) the procedure works just fine. ::sound of scratching heads::

Our guess is there is a constraint somewhere within UNIX or Oracle (our money's on UNIX) that we need to modify to allow us to output more characters (we need millions!) We discovered UNIX ulimit, but this was already set to a nice big number and wasn't our problem (at least so far as we can tell...).

Anyone have any ideas or clues for us? Any assistance is much appreciated! Thanks! Received on Mon Jan 26 1998 - 00:00:00 CST