A question about exporting

I have a couple of questions I'm hoping someone can help me with. First, I took a look at dbexport and was wondering what it does about nulls when it is exporting. I figured it would probably put two delimiters side by side, but what about character fields. In character fields there can be a definite difference between a null character field and an empty string. I ran a test and saw that the dbexport command will show a null value properly (||), but with a zero length string (not null mind you) it pads it to a single space. The question: How the heck do I keep dbexport from altering my data? Next, the reason why I was looking into this is that a colleague told me that I should take the very large database I'm working with and unload and reload it. He said I could increase performance by doing this since it has been built from an empty database to about 150MB by adding a single record at a time, and that something to do with indexing would be defragged (or something like that). The question: Can an export-import cycle increase performance? -- -----------------------+--------------------------------------------------- Charles "Chip" Yamasaki| The opinions expressed here are my own and are not chip@osh1.OSHA.GOV | supported or even generally accepted by OSHA. :-) -----------------------+---------------------------------------------------