>Thank you for the reply. But, under VFP 7.0, the same command worked much faster on a table with 3 times the records. But soon I upgraded to 9.0, all kind of speed issues kicked in. I will try to use gigabyte hub with gigabyte nic cards.
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As Tore and Boris pointed out, the query is not optimizable. As result the whole table has to be brought to workstation over the wire and each record checked for word 'TOOLS' in the itm_desc field. I don't see how VFP version could make any difference in this case.