>I think it's a bad idea. If somebody changes where condition of the query or makes query not fully optimizable some other way, you'll get wrong result.

Fortunately (or not, depending on your pov), the SQL statement is hard coded and not subject to user interference. It is used for a very specific purpose which would become worthless anyway if somebody changed it. It's a real simple statement, but even though there is an index exactly matching the where clause, and an index on DELETED(), when it runs on a table of about 100,000 records, it takes about 10 seconds to run. Doing what I'm doing brings it down to sub 1 second. I'm going to continue trying to find a better option, but I think for now, I may just have to treat this as a temporary fix.

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>>Ah. The one thing I didn't try was with both ANSI and EXACT set ON, and the result is the sam as with them both set off. Then that answers the question. That being the case, then am I safe in doing what I'm doing in turning off EXACT and ANSI in order to keep the table's deleted flags set? Or do you think I'm playing with fire?
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>>>W/o NOFILTER VFP may create filtered cursor by applying SET FILTER/SET FIELDS to the source table opened similar to USE...AGAIN. It cannot be done when SET EXACT and SET ANSI doesn't match. I don't think it's documented anywhere.