||The field limitation is easily overcome by using a single identifier field and then joining as many additional tables as you like. (Using this method I have worked with shapefiles having many thousands of fields.) By using a width-10 numeric field for the identifier, for example, the sole remaining dBase limitation is that of file size on disk (of 2 GB), which limits you to about 200 million records. That's actually not a limitation due to the bound on the number of vertices in the _shape_ part of the shapefile (not its attribute table): that part, too, is limited to a file size of 2 GB. Because each vertex requires a pair of doubles, therefore totaling 16 bytes, the shape part of a shapefile cannot hold more than about 128 million vertices (and therefore will not exceed the dBase record limitation unless there are many null records).