>>Hi Gary,
>>
>>the oplocks comments are sound. As we found out when we deployed our app back in 2002.
>>
>>BUT -- when a file is over a certain size (seems like it was about 200MB), we found a slowness in opening that no amount of changing indexes, etc. fixed. And these openings were being done with NODATA. I looked at it with Filemon, advanced options, and what I saw was every record being scanned.
>
>I've found that using CREATE CURSOR is much faster than NODATA with complex SQL and even faster than asking a remote database for an empty structure.

Of course, as it doesn't visit the server at all.

Getting an empty cursor from another side accomplishes two things Create Cursor doesn't: gets you the latest structure, and checks that you can get it. Since this empty is usually retrieved early on, before the user did anything, it is the right time to do such a check. Having the user wait a bit is far better than hitting him with an error message when trying to save.