Hi Jason,

IMHO, the problem is why does the user want to see more than a thousand records at once? A user surely cannot mentally process or deal with a thousand records. The tricky thing is you have to try and identify the users access patterns and provide a facility for the user to specifiy more clearly what information they are looking for, so that you can only bring down the records that the user REALLY wants to work with.

This is sometimes a difficult concept to convince users of, when they are used to File Server based systems that showed them a huge list and then let them choose what they wanted.

Look for some data within your tables that would allow them to categorize the data and then present a listbox or a treeview and let them choose the category. Can you imagine if Windows Explorer presented a complete listing of all the files on you disk whenever you started it? It is the same concept, but even more vitally important because in a C/S database application the data has to come across the network.

BTW, I've looked for clean paging techniques and have not found any, the only way to fake a solution to your problem is to use an asynchronous query. The user gets the first few records quickly, but then bogs down the network for the rest of the query!


Darrel Miller