I am currently running a 2.4ghz system with dual 40 Gig hard drives
and 1 GB of Ram. I do an enormous amount of ad hoc reporting and once
I get organized I will be looking to begin formalizing some of my
reporting and analysis. Currently I use Access 2000 and have VB and
Foxpro on my box, though I do not currently use them.

I have very large (some have 6 million records or more) text files
that I begin with. I then currently import them into Access 2000 and
run my queries and the like from there. (Linking to the text files is
near impossible.....takes forever to access the data.)

Here are the size and number of records of just a few of the files I
deal with.

Records        Size
170,388        65.3MB
1,881,905      208MB
6,321,618      Comes in 3 files, 508MB, 148MB ,& 350MB (I add them
together in Access)

As you can see I'm dealing with a lot of info and its not anything I
can scale down. Its all important data. This info is refreshed about
once per month.

My Question is, what is the most efficient Database Management Program
to use for managing tons of data and doing both day to day ad hoc
reporting/excel exports (for file requests) and future organized
reporting and data mining. I have used VB a few times and am no pro at
it. I used to use Foxpro quite a bit a while back but am used to the
feel of Access 2000 mostly. Learning SQL wouldn't kill me. I am just
curious what is out there that can handle this stuff. I am already
reaching that 2GB limit on some of my Access Databases so I'm pretty
sure no matter what, Access 2000 will NOT be my back end, even if I
continue to use it as my front end.

Any help and/or comments welcome.

Thanks,

James