ReportWriter memory problem with long reports

I have a bizarre problem which almost certainly is a bug in Oracle SQL*ReportWriter. I'm using an ancient version of ReportWriter (namely 1.1.8; even PCs have 1.1.12 nowadays) on an ancient platform (Unisys U6000 UNIX System V version 3.00 release 12.15 with Oracle RDBMS 6.0.27.7.1), so I hope this is fixed in current versions. However, I need a workaround, if there exists one.

I have a BIG report which results in a 1600000 byte listing file. I added some fields to the page header using the following kludge: create a summary of the data of interest as follows:

Name               Source       Function   Print group   Reset group
the_field_kludge   the_field    First      REPORT        PAGE

This is necessary because I cannot reference the_field directly in page headers.

Before this the report worked just fine, but after this THE MEMORY IMAGE OF THE REPORTWRITER INCREASES RAPIDLY, until at about 18000000 bytes the process aborts and dumps a core file of 18000000 bytes! I guess the system runs out of swap space. The amount of memory needed seems to be proportional to the listing file size. I followed the increase of memory image via the ps -l command and file growth - when SRW printed 100K more, the memory image grew by about 1.2 MB.

HAS ANYONE ELSE ENCOUNTERED THE SAME PROBLEM? OR HAS ANYONE EVER SUCCEEDED TO CREATE MANY MEGABYTES OF OUTPUT WITHOUT MEMORY PROBLEMS? IS THIS A KNOWN BUG? I have no idea why the memory image increases in size - maybe SRW must hold entire report in core in order to be able to process REPORT-wide summaries?

The report uses many fields with source &SQL - could this be the cause of the problem? Maybe those (or some other SRW construct) allocates memory which it forgets to free???

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Juhani Jaakola, jaakola_at_cc.helsinki.fi