Hi Nick,

what happens if you change the order of the test. Run the test that takes 0.7 seconds before running the first one. Are you getting the same results, or are noth queries suddenly fast? If both are fast, the speed increase of the second one is caused by caching a huge part of the table due to the copy and indexing process.

You could drop the index on LEFT(OrdNo,1) if you change the expression to OrdNo = cDept. When SET ANSI is OFF, VFP automatically only compares up to the length of the right string in SELECT queries. Since this index has only a few different values it'll take a long time to load the index on LEFT() across the network.