INDEXING large tables?

Has anyone been able to successfully index **very** large tables in OnLine 7.22 (or better). I've had a support call into Lenexa for better than 2 weeks with a system that is essentially down, and Informix doesn't seem to know what to do to fix it. Situation: table: 381 million rows (35 bytes wide) fragmented by expression (using a mod function) into 5 dbspaces. index: 3 integers......total size 3x4 + 4 = 16 bytes/row temp space: 20 gigabytes. Running the index has blown up with "out of sort space" about 15 times. What I think is happening is: each temp space chunk is 2 gig, which is the Informix size limit. When the index is sorting it tries to write to one of the many "buckets" in the temp space (I have 10 of these 2-gig chunks) When it gets close to the end of the index, it hits the limit on one of the chunks (2gig) and blows up, even though there is additional temp space in other chunks. Tell me this isn't true!!!! If it is true, that means that Informix has an intrinsic limit of table sizes that it can index. I'm testing this theory now by taking my 10 2-gig temp chunks and turning them into 5 4-gig temp spaces, each with 2 chunks of 2 gig apiece. I'm hoping that Informix will continue to write into the second chunk of each tempspace. I'm afraid that Informix is looking for contiguous space and will continue to fail. So my question is...has anybody actually built **big** indexes as opposed to starting small and indexing as you go? Hopefully wrong, Joe -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Lumbley(jlumbley@netcom.com) author of: "INFORMIX DBA Survival Guide" Slaving away on "INFORMIX DEBUGGERS Survival Guide", available early 1998 from Prentice Hall/Informix Press. If you have debugging tips, tools, or ideas to share, please send me some e-mail. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------