>See my e-mail reply. Yes, our RI works fine with NULLS. In fact, FK can be either real values or NULLs. Remember our discussions about new RI about a year ago? We're using my modification of Doug Henning/Steve Saywer (or who was it?) NewRI program.

For sure - but RI might be a large part of those 4H. Since for every record added some queries are run, this is more suspect than simple field validations, even if they are not optimised like that check for every char to be a digit. Even running a couple of thousand such checks will be nowhere near the current runtime.

regards

thomas