Thank you AM. Very useful note, must appreciate the info you shared. About COPY, I have two simple questions: 1. Is there anything like an ALTER DATABASE command? I would like to change the character set without having to recreate the DATABASE again! 2. Also, when I do a mysqldump I seem to be ending up with "\r" in my lines, or so the COPY command tells me: ERROR: literal carriage return found in data HINT: Use "\r" to represent carriage return. CONTEXT: COPY links, line 962974 But afaik, there is nothing in my data in MySQL that contains the new line characters! I have checked and rechecked in the DB to find such characters. I cannot open that text file to check because it contains a lot of data (from about 7 million records). So I tried to do a "grep '\r' FILENAME" but that doesn't help either because of course there is a newline character, that is what is used to separate a line! Is there anything else I can do to make sure mysqldump data comes through? Perhaps separate fields by TABS and lines by a specific character such as "`"? TIA for any thoughts. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster