I could certainly be wrong but I'll also add that I doubt that BCP has a 4K limit for the format file especially since they allow XML formats. I've not found any documentation in Books Online that speaks of any such limit. These types of problems usually arise because someone doesn't realize that dynamic SQL results sometimes truncate to 4 or 8k if all of the variables being concatenated aren't all of the MAX datatype. To overcome that without setting all the variables to be so large, you can usually get away with making a CAST to a MAX datatype as the most outer function applied to the concatenation used to build the dynamic SQL.