Hello Gentlemen,

thank you for the tips that reached me online and offline. Some were about
using perl / perl- based database and some about reading direcly in AS.

As I do not know much about perl and it seems to be a new world for me I
currently prefer a solution based on plain AS. As seen in the Standard
Additions the "read" command can start from an absolute position given to
it as an integer. Therefore the byte address within the file is limited
to "MaxInt" (Max_imum Int_eger as it was called in Pascal - my first love)

If integers are 16 bit in AS then the file size is limited to 65.536 bytes
which is too small.
If integers are 32 bit in AS then the file size is limited to 4.294.967.296
bytes and is for sure big enough.

Unfortuntely I found no source about the internal representation of
integers in AS. Could please anybody be as kind as telling me how
big "MaxInt" in AS is??

Best Wishes
Franz