* Greg Stark:
> That's one thing that gives me pause about the current approach of
> using more tapes. It seems like ideally the user would create a
> temporary work space on each spindle and the database would arrange
> to use no more than that number of tapes. Then each merge operation
> would involve only sequential access for both reads and writes.
And you'd need to preallocate the files in some way or other, to avoid
file system fragmentation.