I have to say, if I tell a machine to pull the records I want and it refuses I will curse the programmers who made it do that. Give the user an ability to escape if it's taking too long. Give them them the ability to provide more criteria. Tell them to be prepared to wait. Leave the decision making to the humans. ANYTHING else is user-hostile.

>>Hi,
>>
>>Could you do a COUNT first and refuse to pull the actual data if the result size was too large ?
>>
>>Regards,
>>Viv
>
>Viv,
>
>This is what Naomi suggested too. But, without testing it, I thought that COUNT() + SQL SELECT could be slower than SQL SELECT with TOP nnn. I need to experiment.
>
>Thank you for your suggestion.