I set a FILTER on a table having over 400,000 records. What I am doing is filtering out records older than January 1st of 2006. The cDATE field is indexed, but it is a character field, not a Date data type field. So, I take the value of the first 4 characters and use VAL on it and only view records having a year value of 2006 or greater.

What is really slow is when navigating to GO TOP and GO BOTTOM; is there any way to speed this up for now? I will push some records out to a historical file later, but for now, I need all the records here during the transition.

Here's the code I used:

SELECT CERTS
SET FILTER TO VAL(LEFT(CERTS.cDate,4)) >= 2006 

Is there any other way to speed this up?