Hi, Cyrus, there's seldom any reason to populate a dropdown with 12,000 rows.

Consider this...use a textbox to allow the user to type a few characters for what they want to search....and then populate the dropdown based on a query using the text.

Just by coincidence, I'm building a demo reporting services report that allows the user to enter a few characters. (see attached file in my reply here...should give you an idea)

In most instances, users know what they're looking for (in part , if not in full), so the results in the dropdown should be far less than 12,000 rows.

I've also seen people have an initial dropdown with category selections (maybe a few dozen)...the user selects the category from the list, and then the second list (which might otherwise show 12,000 rows) is filtered based on the selection from the first dropdown.

Others have posted other suggestions....but bottom line, there's rarely (if ever) a reason to show that many items in a list.

Hope this helps...