When the SAP Data Downloader and subsequently OPAL/Miner were in the development process, using Visual Basic was our first choice. However we found that memory management within VB was not as robust as we would have liked. It worked well with small tables but whenever we hit it with a large download it would invariably fail with memory errors even if the system was reporting memory available. Knowing that a large number of SAP tables contain a large number of records and that users would find this limitation unsatisfactory, we decided to re-work our design using MS Access and VBA. Similarly large downloads did not fail. When we increased the size of the downloads they only failed as a result of low memory. Unlike with VB, when we increased the pagefile size the download was able to be completed successfully. We have successfully downloaded in excess of 500,000 records filled out to the maximum record length. We feel that this would be an unreasonable amount of data for anyone to download and were very pleased with the result. We currently have no plans of pursuing the VB option although this may change in future.