>>i>>The fact that he is browsing hundreds of thousands of records is what is killing him. That works OK with VFP and a DBF (local preferably). Now he's pulling all records across the network.
>
>OK, but anyway, just forget the number of records for a while, that's not the point. Can't I get any amount of records, and loop to get more (as the help file says I can) ?

SELECT TOP X FROM table WHERE a >? lastkey ORDER BY a should do that