Ingres questions followup

I've gotten a number of responses to my questions about Ingres. It seems clear that Ingres does have a limit of ~2000 bytes per database record. The only way around this is to split the data into two tables and combine them. I look on this as a kludge, since then the structure of the database is being driven by something other than normalization criteria. It seems that most Ingres customers don't think that this is a serious problem. I'm not sure if it would be for us or not, but I'm also not sure it wouldn't. It certainly isn't an order of magnitude larger than what is reasonably needed. Nobody could think of any concerns involved with importing/exporting text files. I take this to mean that ASCII I/O is also restricted to ~2000 characters per line, but that there are no additional restrictions. It appears that this is true even on VAX machines, where text files have traditionally been restricted to 255 characters per line. It appears that it is also true that Ingres does not support row or record level locking. That may or may not be important to us either, but does make one wonder. The question then comes up as to whether other major database vendors, in particular Oracle, Informix and Sybase, have these same or similar limitations. Also, what other limitations or potential traps may there be that I don't know about. Please post or cross-post any comments in comp.databases, as I don't read the various subgroups. Bill Thompson