Tim,
I was just reading the article you posted on UTL_FILE improvements in 9iR2. Do you know if there are any performance improvements also? I'm using UTL_FILE to create large (4GB+) output flat files in stored procedures in 8i and 9.0.x. The write performance is horrendous but it would be worth upgrading to r2 if it would improve.
Thanks for your input,
Beth