thanks Rick,
i am getting ready for my retirement at the end of this year. So one of my apps here at the state of Connecticut is being rewritten in c# and sqlserver by a vendor not familiar with VFP
so I did xmltocursor to hand over the date to them

is there a better way??

Peter


>Don't create gynormous XML documents. :-) Seriously that's not what XML is for. If you need to package large data tables or results, run them to DBF and then zip up and unpack the files. You get smaller files and much more performant operation.
>
>As Sergey pointed out CursorToXml() is simple because it just creates linear output one record at a time. However, the reverse uses the XML DOM which has to load the entire XML into memory (which can be very slow by itself as it build the DOM tree) and then has to parse through the XML document.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>why is xmltocursor so much slower that cursortoxml???
>>
>>what can I do to speed it up ???
>>
>>the conversion to xml takes a few seconds, the revers days!!!!!
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>>
>>Peter