We're tracking the progress of HP's repairs to LargeFile datasets (LFDS), the greater-than-4GB containers for IMAGE data. The feature has had its problems since its release, but it looks like a new patch has entered testing outside of HP's database labs. Liz Glogowski of HP told us:

We have passed all our in-house unit and regression testing on the LFDS, and have passed the files to a database tools provider to start their internal testing.

We're keeping an eye on this, and we'll have more to say about it in next week's FlashPaper, available online at our www.3000newswire.com/flashpaper. (Each month we also make a PDF version of the FlashPaper available as a download, too; here's June's.) But we can say this much about this repair: testing it will take longer than lots of other repairs to HP 3000 bugs. LFDS by their nature are really big, and it wouldn't be unusual for a single run of a test suite to take 90 hours. It's the kind of test that an N-Class server could speed up, but being in a hurry about the testing probably isn't the best strategy. It's taken more than a year to get a patch out of HP's database labs, another testament to the complexity of making something very big very fast, too. Stay tuned.