Hi Mike,

>Funny, Google lets anyone pull a query on just about anything. A query for the single letter A returns 8,790,000,000 hits. If the user wants to scroll through all of those records, it lets them.
>
>It's our job to support the users with enabling technology. Google does this with pagination, but it REFUSES to search.
>

Google does exactly what I'm advocating - gives you a count (and then obviously not by a query against the full base). You can't download the 8,790,000,000 hits in one go - just a maximum of 100 per page. And that's *still* not the actual pages - just the links.

>>>Backups take hours. Should the backup software REFUSE to run?
>>Backups are different argument. They can run in the background, at a lower priority, be scheduled for low usage periods and don't neccessarily affect network bandwidth.
>>
>Actually, they are not a different argument. It's a piece of software running in a particular environment. It's often required to backup all files across the entire network. The backup programmers don't build in code that says if the backup operator (user) wants to run the backup at 3 in the afternoon REFUSE to do it.

Surely not every user is a backup operator? Maybe we're just used to working in different environments. If you grant someone backup priveledges then the assumption should be that there capable of making reasonable decisions on the backup strategy. IAC backup isn't going to make much demand on the processor.

Regards,
Viv