>Bonnie,
>
>Thanks! We give users fields were they can specify what they want to look for (i.e. date range, item #, customer #, etc...). If they leave all the fields blank and hit search, (this is in our VFP app) they get everything from the table. With just a handful of clients, there are tables with over 250,000 records.
>
>Just so I understand, you're advising me to limit that query command to a max number of records?
>
>What happens with someone with low RAM, machine dies?
>
>Is there any provision for this in .NET?
>
>Sorry for what seems to be stupid questions, but I'm trying to put .NET into the real world.

First of all you need to make your best effort to ensure that no SQL query pulls more than a reasonable number of records at any time. Reasonable depends on the amount of data in each record and how fast a user expects data to appear. IMHO that means NEVER pull more than a couple of thousand records EVER. Make sure you have where and or filter conditions to ensure it. There is no reason to have users look at 250000 records onscreen - EVER. If something needs to be done to the records, it needs to be done on the SQL server - not on the client.

One way to warn a user is to do a select count * version of your query if you suspect it may pull a huge number of records, and if the count is above a reasonable limit, warn the user before actually pulling the records. I do this in some applications (SQL based with either VFP or ASP.NET front ends) - I warn the user to fix their query parameters to try to limit the records or be prepared to wait for the data to appear.