Thank you for that. I had not looked at VACUUM. But while it does create and write to a file, it is not ASCII, but includes some binary as well. I'd like to save the data to a pure SQl file, so I can use it later in other scenarios. I run on a Mac so in Terminal I did vacuum into "/Users/user/Desktop/fubar.sql"; I need to run the command via Perl so I've tried a few 'system' commands and have come close but no cigar.