editor for HUGE text files

[nonsequitur]

I work in healthcare consulting, most of what i do is on the desktop end of things with ms access, and an archane reporting tool (focus).

we've purchased some claims data from medicare, but the catch is that the data is pretty much dumped on to 100 3490E tapes without much of any organization. this means when restored, i'm going to have over 100 GB of data to filter through.

i've been using textpad for some text files that were a few GB in size, but that's peanuts compared to what's coming down the pipe. textpad can sort the managably sized text files and i can toss out the data i don't need. each record has a record type with which i can know what to keep and what to toss.

we are not running sql server locally, but i have a feeling that we'll need to use that and set up some sort of DTS script since each the file format is pretty goofy.

i'm somewhat thinking out loud here. i'm thinking a dts script may be the only way to parse this. anyone else travel down a similar road before?

-Brian

edit... i can't say i've ever signed a post before.

 

[cuemasterfl]

Ultraedit. It's not free but it's super fast and powerful.

http://www.ultraedit.com

 

[RedShark]

Ultraedit. It's not free but it's super fast and powerful.

Seconded. UltraEdit has several options in the preferences specifically to better handle large files.

 

[tdg]

Thirded, UltraEdit is the best editor I've found. I really only use it to edit UNIX and Cisco config files on a Windows machine so Windows doesn't bork the return characters, but it seems to have every feature possible with a text editor.

 

[nonsequitur]

thanks for the suggestion. working with their support peeps now.